21–30 of 682 posts
My 4090 and 12900k are gonna have to last till 2029 at this rate won’t they…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever since I started working from home I barely use my phone, I just buy a mid range phone, and it seems just as capable as high range phone in most every practical way. The only real thing that seems a bit better is the camera, but I don't actually use it that often. The only thing I've really been a bit tempted by is Lidar on Apple, but more for dev fun that normal practical purposes.
> The only thing I've really been a bit tempted by is Lidar on Apple Maybe in that vein, one thing I wish phones would do to differentiate themselves is just add more sensors. I want my phone to be the tricorder from star trek. iPhones should have first party support for generating point clouds and measuring distances using lidar. Their microphones are probably already calibrated, why not expose that as a decibel met…
The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate. From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagsh…
I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).
What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…
Literally the most overwhelming thought, reading this, is "man, capitalism is a mistake" The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ... Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in
"In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a market stall in Nairobi or Lagos, you’ll be able to find a cheap smartphone—like the Tecno Spark Go, manufactured by China’s Transsion—for somewhere between $30 and $120. That phone will run on a processor capable of billions of calculations per second."
As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer because most compute-based products have matured, with CPUs not seeing substantial gains and memory usage really only expanding at the absolute top end of workloads pre-LLMs (3D and HPC in particular). An iPhone 14 still has almost all the features of the iPhone 17, because the compute capabilities are remarkably similar; Geekbench shows a performance delta of ~25-30% between the 14 and 17 Pro Max models, which is pretty paltry considering the devices are separated by four years of manufacturing improvements. This extends into desktops, laptops, tablets, STBs, and more, with only VR devices and larger ARM/RISC-based kit seeing more substantial uplifts as general designs improve.
So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year. Even if LLMs fail spectacularly and all that memory capacity becomes available, HBM memory likely isn't to find its way into many consumer devices (just ask AMD how it worked out for them on consumer GCN GPUs).
The name of the game, especially for consumers, is efficiency - "potato builds", as I've been calling them. Software and services optimized for lower power, smaller-specced devices of increasing age instead of pandering to flagship devices with poorly optimized code or engines for the sake of new shinies (like Raytracing). Between the memory shortage, shifting geopolitics, rising costs, and stagnant wages, consumer purchasing power is going to be squeezed like a vice for the foreseeable future, and businesses will need to adapt around that reality.
At Xiaomi's latest smartphone launch event, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun said that memory prices are likely to keep rising over the next two years, which could drive smartphone prices up as well. His conclusion was pretty direct: everyone should just replace their phones now. Kind of a depressing story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, the iPhone 17 Pro is a huge improvement. Second, the article doesn’t focus on phones we buy. There won’t be a shortage of those.
What does it improve, in practice? For myself, I need my phone to make phone calls, take photos/videos, occasionally run apps, and to be a wifi hotspot. My iPhone 6S did all of these well enough that I only upgraded it recently because I dropped it and bent the power button. My new phone has a slightly nicer camera and better battery life, that’s about it.
1. High-resolution screen, finally approaching paper (600dpi) 2. High-refresh rate screen, up to 240 fps. Once you see 60 fps, you are already hooked, and 240 is just mind-blowing. 3. High-resolution camera, 50 Mpx means that the camera actually starts to match paper (600dpi) 4. Slo-mo camera (240 fps) to match the screen. 5. Decent memory sizes. On my recent 24 Gb size memory I can actually run multiple apps in parallel, and they are not getting killed. You see, using all available memory is a competitive strategy for app developers -- when they use all the memory, their competitors are evicted from RAM and the user is less likely to receive notifications. 6. Decent sdcard size (1Tb). Same reason for the storage. App manufacturers are trying to use all available space, so that you would delete the competitor's apps in order to keep using theirs. 7. HDMI over USB -- finally you can connect a keyboard and a monitor, and get rid of your laptop, just use one device for everything.
What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…
And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.
This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare this to America where there is maybe one or two players in the entire nation.
Quite pathetic, but we live in a pathetic world so it tracks.