Mastodawn

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".

Show thread

Jon Renaut 1d ago

@cstross I'm curious what's going to happen now that 90% or more of computer users can do everything they want with a $500 laptop. That same level of machine would have struggled with 10 browser tabs just a minute ago

Show thread

Charlie Stross 1d ago

@ebooksyearn Yes. As it happens I have a ~$500 machine from 2 years ago. Intel N100 cpu, 12Gb RAM, same size SSD: runs Linux Mint nicely, but the flip side is the battery life is about 2h30m instead of 16h. A deal-breaker, that.

Apple *somehow* squared the circle.

Show thread

Joe W

@cstross @ebooksyearn interesting! My old n450 (I think it was ..) laptop (ok. Netbook) managed more than 8 hours easily, I used it every day on the commute, writing papers or code. Wouldn't work for my eyesight these days, though.
And I have been arguing that we have reached good enough for a while. My kids' second hand ThinkPad is not really worse than my newer one. Except for battery life due to wear.