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
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.
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@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."
@stevendbrewer @cstross That's basically what I did with this computer. Wanted a nice IPS monitor for photo editing, the computer itself was more or less an afterthought.
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@juergen_hubert @cstross There’s always looting ai data centers as an option. Probably not a solo thing.
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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 outside of the Apple world we've had them for decades
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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 Is this not just Apple doing what other laptop manufacturers have been doing for a while? My sprogs's laptops they use for school work and playing games are a higher spec than the Neo and were cheaper.
I mean it's great that you can now enter the walled garden of a massively overrated UX for cheap, but, like most Apple products, it's nothing new or better.
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@cstross 8GB RAM definitely still feels like it could be a limiting factor, though. Although to be fair iOS handles it pretty well.
@Salty @cstross my experience is just comparing RAM sizes is misleading, just like comparing GHz etc.
They've highly optimized it - I'd say 8GB is enough for most "normal" use cases even though that sounds surprising. So, why pay the memory tax?
I think we've been marketed into believing we need lots of RAM (also indoctrinated into believing we do by history, edge use cases and the profligate nature of some OS environments).
I don't have a Neo. But, I have a MacBook Air M1 we got as freebie when Apple first released aarch64 Arm SoCs. That's the 8GB base spec.
I assumed it'd be a poor experience when I got it. But, it works absolutely fine with multiple browsers/tabs, libre office, untitled goose game, etc - all those things that probably constitute "normal" computer use. And that is a few generations ago.
Unsurprisingly it doesn't work fine for technical tasks like building large SW stacks or hosting VMs. But, that's a way smaller cohort's use case - outside Mastodon at least!
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