141–150 of 173 posts
Now include the failure rate of electron tubes, and the literal bugs that would gum up the works, and this theoretical machine becomes impossible even ignoring the power consumption.
I salute your high barrier of impossibility.
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My point wasn't about the name but about the new product line. iPhone X is a new product line. Apple have made fundamental changes to the user interface. The iPhone 9 would be the successor to the iPhone 8. Whatever name Apple comes up with for iPhone X's successor, it's almost certain to keep the new 'all screen' interface.
Well I'm sure it's Apple's intention to not give up a super fat margin after establishing it. It remains to be seen whether in the medium term the market would keep its enthusiasm for a "legacy" iPhone range which becomes implicitly old and busted in the shadow of the "real" iPhone and competitor products.
The iPhone X almost certainly higher margin than the iPhone. My argument was that if consumers tolerate the $1000 price this time, they shouldn't be surprised to see future high end phones at similar prices.
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Nuclear fusion.
The US is participating in the ITER project [0], that's pretty much as good as it get's right now unless a country starts their own, very expensive, project. [0] https://science.energy.gov/~/media/fes/pdf/DOE_US_Participat...
24 MHz? I can’t make that work with a simple typo...
Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. Unless a killer application needs a billion transistors, the value created over a previous iPhone is incremental. I think a better way to measure value is invention's cost effectiveness = price / (time * improvement to well-being) The denominator is how much the invention makes our lif…
I would take hot water and refrigeration/AC any day over a smartphone.
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Fault of the the webpage or the phone? multiple milliseconds or seconds? Ridiculous! Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted. Or that mp3 track from some obscure FTP server....
"Fault of the webpage or the phone." Webpage. But this problem applies equally to local software. I believe there was a name for it but I cannot recall the term. The idea is that as hardware gets faster, software developers add bloat^W features so that the user always experiences the same speed. "Speed" mean something like the time taken to perform some routine user task. Microsoft has been usurping user resources li…
This is true, but there's a couple of other factors involved. One is the recent gains in storage efficiency, and the other is familiarity over time with the new gains. When SSDs hit the scene, you could migrate your existing installation to solid state storage and see immediate, measurable gains. Then PC manufacturers started shipping SSDs as standard equipment, and folks got used to that level of performance. Essentially, it became the new normal. A while later NVMe hit the scene and suddenly even traditional SSDs began to feel "too slow". Again, manufacturers are beginning to ship NVMe-based units, pushing the tolerance levels even further out.
I've experienced this recently; my main workstation has a Skylake CPU, DDR4 RAM, and an NVMe OS drive, with a SSHD (solid state hybrid drive) for storage. I recently revived an older but still very fast workstation with a standard HDD, and it felt like I'd gone back to the "Windows Vista Capable" days of the late 2000s. Same OS (Windows 10 and Elementary OS), same software, technically faster CPU on the older workstation, but it was so "slow" I could barely stand to use it. I felt like I was waiting ages for applications to start or web pages to load, even though it was usually less than a few seconds difference. But oh, what a difference those precious seconds can make in human perception!
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> Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. I think this is far more difficult to evaluate than your comment admits. More transistors -> more software that can do more things, written by developers with a wider range of skills, in a society with increased tech permeation, and so on...
The trade off is usually ~same functionality but better graphics. Compare Office 1997 with Office 2017 and the average user sees a very modest improvement relative to how much better of a computer you need.
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My family were not nearly millionaires when we bought a $1500 equivalent computer in 1982, but this phone costs less than that. And a iPhone X isn't a phone, it's a computer. I agree you do need to be in an upper tier economically to afford one, but only speaking globally. People bought plenty of laptops when they averaged well over $1000. The way phones are financed makes them much more attainable, also. The way peo…
At the risk of getting into a completely different debate, the iPhone is not a computer. A computer allows the user to write and run any program of their choosing. An iPhone can only run programs approved by Apple, and the user cannot use the iPhone to generate new programs. So while technically the iPhone is a computer, with a microprocessor that executes instructions, primary and secondary storage, and so on, the d…
I'm not an iPhone developer, but from what i understand you can write apps to do about anything and run them yourself - just not distribute them on the app store.
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"Fault of the webpage or the phone." Webpage. But this problem applies equally to local software. I believe there was a name for it but I cannot recall the term. The idea is that as hardware gets faster, software developers add bloat^W features so that the user always experiences the same speed. "Speed" mean something like the time taken to perform some routine user task. Microsoft has been usurping user resources li…
"By the time the user purchased a new computer, the company had a new software version that already uses up whatever resource gains the new hardware provided. Pre-installed. The end result is the user experiences the same speed." This is true, but there's a couple of other factors involved. One is the recent gains in storage efficiency, and the other is familiarity over time with the new gains. When SSDs hit the scen…