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".

@cstross

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.

@Phosphenes
🤭
I like this. It's good to chuckle - even if the cause is inherently depressing.
@cstross
@phpete @Phosphenes I realized we were doomed NO LATER THAN the excited new feature announcement from Microsoft to the effect that Windows Vista would perform anti-aliasing on the cursor drop-shadow.

@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.

@Phosphenes

@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

@auzdavenice

Agreed, we joke but many specific people in my life come to mind - I simply don't understand it.

@cstross @Phosphenes