[Comevius]

Hardware improvement slowed down considerably in the last 10 years. A Core i7-3970X from 2012 is still comparable to a typical notebook processor, or the fastest smartphone chips today, including the one in the Meta Quest Pro that was just announced.

But imagine the same happening between 1992 and 2002. 10 years there meant fundamental incompatibility. A 486 computer with 8 MB RAM and VGA graphics card was already a paper weight in 2002. No Windows XP and Warcraft 3 for you. A Core i7-3970X with a GeForce GTX 680 can still play the latest games at 1080p, including many DirectX 12 games, except for the ones that now require AVX2.

But to answer your question if we would have been stuck with 1992 technology the internet would have evolved differently, and mainframes would play a much bigger role, to the point that your desktop computer would be just a thin client, running the latest amazing software accelerated by mainframe computers. You would submit jobs from your computer, the mainframe would calculate it and get back to you.

[_manifold]

>But to answer your question if we would have been stuck with 1992 technology the internet would have evolved differently, and mainframes would play a much bigger role, to the point that your desktop computer would be just a thin client, running the latest amazing software accelerated by mainframe computers. You would submit jobs from your computer, the mainframe would calculate it and get back to you.

We're kind of getting back to this in a roundabout way, with more and more programs and services being run as web applications in a browser, or otherwise being inseparably tied into cloud technology/storage (looking at you, Adobe.)

With the advent of AI tools that require significant GPU hardware to run there may actually be a legitimate basis for it, but in general it just seems an excuse for companies to have their own tightly-controlled ecosystem which can be continually monetized and exploited.

[kjellsbells]

It always strikes me as ironic that the PC won over the mainframe because it was your capital-P Personal Computer, not a terminal that simply ran what the high priests in the mainframe room told you you could run, and now the PC is anything but yours to control.

[cercatrova]

Or startups like Mighty.app where, if your computer is too slow to run Chrome, just stream Chrome from the cloud. I just...don't even know what to say.

[cjk]

Mighty is such a great example of attacking the symptom(s) of the problem ("Chrome/the web is slow") rather than the root cause (rampant page size/complexity bloat, inefficient use of RAM/CPU, etc.). What a waste of talent and money.

[AlmostAnyone]

How exactly should this talent and money change other's apps and companies? They are solving a problem, you're just talking idealism.

[cjk]

Idealism? Hardly. The fact that anyone thinks that Mighty needs to exist signals a problem with the entire web and/or app development ecosystem, in my opinion.

We should be talking about ways to either 1) make it possible to develop performant and resource-sensitive web apps, or 2) make it dramatically easier to make native/native-feeling apps in a way that doesn’t involve so much legacy cruft.

The lack of a solid reason #2 is why Electron-based apps exist and are thriving. Making native apps for each individual platform is hard and resource-intensive.

I have long been a proponent of native apps, but I will be the first to admit that it’s not that simple for small/resource-limited teams. The rise of Electron/etc. is a failing of the pro-native segment of developers. We need a better alternative.

[AlmostAnyone]

Sure, it signals a problem - I just don't get what you think this group of people should've done with that problem other than what they're doing. They're solving a real problem with a real solution - you're just talking about what the ideal world would look like, but it's not actionable by a team like Mighty in any way.

[6510]

If you give the devs 2 extra clock cycles they find ways to use 4 extra without doing anything new.

[_8ysf]

> Hardware improvement slowed down considerably in the last 10 years.

But somehow we keep changing smartphones and smart devices every 2 years or so. Is that just marketing, and the fact that older smartphones are obsolete because unsupported (and not because the hardware is not performant enough)?

Also didn't hardware get smaller?

[Comevius]

Even smartphones hit a point of diminishing returns after a while. A 5 years old Samsung Galaxy S8 would be still perfectly usable, and better than most cheap devices today, it's just unsupported, because go buy the new one. Fortunately you can slap a ROM on it and keep using it, you can even replace the battery. Unfortunately millions of these devices are already chilling on a landfill somewhere. It's not like we are running out of the resources to make new ones, or there is an environmental collapse looming around.

[ajb]

Even if the processor continued to work, the flash storage and battery in these devices aren't going to keep working forever. If we want to have longer lived devices, these parts will need to be standardised and user-replaceable

[6510]

I think a thicker phone would exist if the feature and performance enhancements were really needed. I would have to conclude that making them thinner is the only real enhancement we've seen. Every other possible feature is traded away for it. The battery is no bigger, you cant get a headphone jack, you get just one port, no cooler, all because it would add mm's.

Do we need cameras this good? The resolution is fit for a huge display - that no one uses anymore. You would have to go back many generations to find one that takes pictures that are not good enough.

[rayiner]

> A Core i7-3970X from 2012 is still comparable to a typical notebook processor, or the fastest smartphone chips today, including the one in the Meta Quest Pro that was just announced.

Not really. Compare a E5-2690 (same Sandy Bridge core as the 3970x just a bit lower clock) to a Mac M1: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd... versus https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd...

The M1 is more than twice as fast in many SPECint subtests, such as 403.GCC and 464.h264ref. That’s just integer code, nothing that would exercise the vector units or anything like that.

[Comevius]

Sorry, I keep forgetting that a MacBook is considered a typical notebook here, I meant those $400 notebooks people buy for school and such. Obviously for 3 to 7 times as much money you get desktop-level performance, no argument there.

[hardware2win]

>Hardware improvement slowed down considerably in the last 10 years.

Hmm, nvme disks? Gpus?