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".

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Phosphenes 1d ago

@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.

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Peter 1d ago

@Phosphenes
🤭
I like this. It's good to chuckle - even if the cause is inherently depressing.
@cstross

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Charlie Stross 1d ago

@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.

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woe2you

@cstross @phpete @Phosphenes The bit that boggled me at the time was when it demanded a brand new SM3 GPU to do a bit of transparency and a 3D task switcher. Meanwhile Beryl/Compiz Fusion could do all manner of wild 3D desktop things on a 7 year old Geforce 2.