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".
Someone once said the Moore's law of software is that the number of CPU instructions it takes to add two numbers doubles every two years.
@cstross
Hey, some people actually WANT cloud compute powered pretty things with constantly spinning color wheels that can only open one ad filled tab at a time.
I don't know any of them personally, but I'm told they exist.
They probably just go to a different high school.
In Canada or something.
@cstross
Careful now - accurate or not, the "get off my lawn / back in MY day" tone is rising.
We're gonna lose support from anyone who doesn't remember configuring hardware via jumpers and frankly they've got the numbers. We need them on our side! Quick, say something about avocados!
;-)
@cstross
Ok, but joking aside we've clearly tipped on some of the icons, right?
Save as a 3.5? I'm not suggesting these things change, but I've had to explain the concept of square disks twice this school year alone.
If that's staying, then clicking it had better create a local file. Save to cloud needs something deliberately 'other'.
@phpete @cstross @Phosphenes I work with so many of them
People who genuinely believe sales pitches and hype; eagerly and proudly post copilot slop into teams
Really truly feel like companies have our best interests at heart
Agreed, we joke but many specific people in my life come to mind - I simply don't understand it.
Charlie Stross
Phosphenes
Peter
Alex UsedToGoToVenice