[docfort]

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the decline of Moore’s Law and how it hasn’t yet exactly fallen for all aspects of computer engineering. I think it’s fallen for customers, though. The economics of exponential speed improvement in traditional CPU design have gone away, and the capability/complexity ratio of software collapsed with the fall of Dennard scaling. No fundamentally new applications have come out (save ML, which is not particularly suited to CPUs or even GPUs), so consumers are happy to keep chugging along with their current setup or move more load to their phones.

Even if the increase in hardware cost stays at parity with inflation, it’s tremendously more expensive than it used to be, when waiting six months could get you more machines for your budget.

Gaming, a previous driver of high-end consumer growth, has split into truly mobile, consoles, and very high end PCs. But complex games take more capital and time to develop, so recouping costs is important (except if the studio is part of a conglomerate like Microsoft that can weather temporary market forces). I’d imagine that places pressure on game developers to aim for maximum compatibility and a scalable core. So too bad for the Mac, great for phones, and great for consoles (especially with monetizing the back catalog). And new PCs will have to fight against good-enough, and lower demand funding new hardware and software.