HYPOTHESIS: while Moore's Law dominated performance in laptops, the rule was "cheap, fast, low power—pick any two".
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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 it nails the “most people’s use cases” in a price point and feature set that’s really hard to argue with
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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 It’s probably the first instance of what will turn out to become _A Laptop_ (no further qualifications necessary, because it does everything everybody expects and needs. Edge cases and niche applications need not apply.)
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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 I believe it does have the AI coprocessor
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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 8GB RAM definitely still feels like it could be a limiting factor, though. Although to be fair iOS handles it pretty well.
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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 I did wonder what Apple was going to do with the “our base CPU is more powerful than most people need it to be” problem besides render the UI through a VFX pipeline.
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@cstross I believe it does have the AI coprocessor
@davidgerard It does, and I've got Apple Intelligence firmly switched off.
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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 I'm curious what's going to happen now that 90% or more of computer users can do everything they want with a $500 laptop. That same level of machine would have struggled with 10 browser tabs just a minute ago
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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
So, which business models are obsoleted now that compute is a commodity?Is it maybe the folks that scream you need AI in everything, so that more datacenters need to be build? Cant allow people to be happy on decade old hardware because that is dampening demand.
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@cstross I'm curious what's going to happen now that 90% or more of computer users can do everything they want with a $500 laptop. That same level of machine would have struggled with 10 browser tabs just a minute ago
@ebooksyearn Yes. As it happens I have a ~$500 machine from 2 years ago. Intel N100 cpu, 12Gb RAM, same size SSD: runs Linux Mint nicely, but the flip side is the battery life is about 2h30m instead of 16h. A deal-breaker, that.
Apple *somehow* squared the circle.
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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".
Got a cheap notebook from 'reward points' at work. I named it 'cromulence'; everything about it is (just) acceptable.
CPU is okay, screen is meh, battery life is good enough. RAM and storage were barely sufficient, but I was easily able to open it up and add RAM and a better NVME I had lying around. Of course I put Linux on it. (Those last three are not common, of course...)
That was before the Neo, which has much better specs - except I can't bump up the RAM or storage on it.
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@cstross
So, which business models are obsoleted now that compute is a commodity?Is it maybe the folks that scream you need AI in everything, so that more datacenters need to be build? Cant allow people to be happy on decade old hardware because that is dampening demand.
@Sweetshark No, those people are scam artists, nothing more and nothing less. (Aside from the delusional sheep who're following them because they don't understand the basics of CS, much less the cognitive psychology hack that makes the tech-illiterate mistake a "chinese room" for a person.)
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@Sweetshark No, those people are scam artists, nothing more and nothing less. (Aside from the delusional sheep who're following them because they don't understand the basics of CS, much less the cognitive psychology hack that makes the tech-illiterate mistake a "chinese room" for a person.)
@cstross @Sweetshark
The Chinese Room was debunked 40 years ago, and I still get people quoting it at me. Not to speak of the people who don’t understand that Neural Nets are not anything like biological neurons. I get tired of explaining CogSci 100 (prerequisite for 101). -
@cstross @Sweetshark
The Chinese Room was debunked 40 years ago, and I still get people quoting it at me. Not to speak of the people who don’t understand that Neural Nets are not anything like biological neurons. I get tired of explaining CogSci 100 (prerequisite for 101).@SpeakerToManagers Chinese Rooms as a procedural system were Searle's attempt at refuting the idea of simulation on philosophical grounds. (He was wrong.) But chatbots with no underlying model of the world aren't conscious either.
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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 It reminds me of when people used to ask me whether to get more RAM or a faster processor and I said, "Buy the largest monitor you can afford, and you have any money left over, buy a computer."
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@SpeakerToManagers Chinese Rooms as a procedural system were Searle's attempt at refuting the idea of simulation on philosophical grounds. (He was wrong.) But chatbots with no underlying model of the world aren't conscious either.
@cstross
True. Searle assumed some godlike being carefully filled in the google or so entries in the lookup tables that controlled the way the little man (or was it a p-zombie? I get confused) inside the room created the translations. I am seriously annoyed by thought experiments that start with incoherent postulates. -
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".
I checked hardware prices for servers yesterday, and a 16 GB DDR5 RAM module had a purchase price of €1600.
How long will "cheap" remain an option under current market conditions?
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I checked hardware prices for servers yesterday, and a 16 GB DDR5 RAM module had a purchase price of €1600.
How long will "cheap" remain an option under current market conditions?
@juergen_hubert @cstross, ouch.
The last RAM which I bought (2×8GB DDR4 3200) cost about £40, though that was 2½ years ago. If the increase in price were in line with inflation, it'd be somewhere around £43 to £45 – but no. From the same supplier, it now costs £145.
Let that popping sound be heard soon…
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@ebooksyearn Yes. As it happens I have a ~$500 machine from 2 years ago. Intel N100 cpu, 12Gb RAM, same size SSD: runs Linux Mint nicely, but the flip side is the battery life is about 2h30m instead of 16h. A deal-breaker, that.
Apple *somehow* squared the circle.
@cstross @ebooksyearn interesting! My old n450 (I think it was ..) laptop (ok. Netbook) managed more than 8 hours easily, I used it every day on the commute, writing papers or code. Wouldn't work for my eyesight these days, though.
And I have been arguing that we have reached good enough for a while. My kids' second hand ThinkPad is not really worse than my newer one. Except for battery life due to wear. -
I checked hardware prices for servers yesterday, and a 16 GB DDR5 RAM module had a purchase price of €1600.
How long will "cheap" remain an option under current market conditions?
@juergen_hubert @cstross There’s always looting ai data centers as an option. Probably not a solo thing.
