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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#431

Post by underlipton »

faust201 wrote: post #411
leptons wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB isn't an "amazing" laptop, it's a budget laptop . It's also thermally constrained quite a bit, so not even as "amazing" as it could be.

The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player). Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing. Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)

>(Same like getting rid of awful flash player).

I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case.

Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#432

Post by adrianwaj »

nine_k wrote: post #426
adrianwaj wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. Convergence will continue. H/W miniaturization will keep increasing. In fact, new brands could easily appear and even overtake the largest players. For example, have you seen this massive range of docking technology. https://us.ugreen.com/collections/usb-c-hubs - these docks only require a single USB port to connect to. That could be a SBC working as a handheld. These docks could end up being the lar…

RAM is going to be the most expensive component, I suppose. But indeed, once you have USB-C support on your device, you can connect all kinds of periphery through it, from keyboards to 4K screens. Standardized device classes obviate the need for most drivers.

Yep. I was thinking that as crypto miners pivot into AI https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/jpmorgan-morgan... - there must also be a case for miners (anyone really) liquidating their hardware, including memory. So the price of memory has its own limits-to-growth - latent availability, but that's another topic.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#433

Post by QuiEgo »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #335
random3 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will ne…

There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model.

I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#434

Post by GolfPopper »

close04 wrote: post #171
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

> We'll have a demand crunch This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud. I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GP…

>Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.

It's also a nightmare from any sort of privacy perspective, in a world that's already becoming too much like a panopticon.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#435

Post by 0xCMP »

josmar wrote: post #221
gregoriol wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long…

Since using NixOS for my home server, I've found it to Just Work™ flawlessly every time. If anyone reading this has struggled with servers accumulating cruft, and requiring maintainance, I recommend NixOS.

Agreed. NixOS + Tailscale is 99% there for me. Using Claude Code to deal with whatever other package I need built with nix while I'm working on $day_job things helps get me to a fully working system. Besides the fact that running containers via podman or docker (your choice) is super easy via a NixOS config.

Combine that with deploy-rs or similar and you have a very very stable way to deploy software with solid rollback support and easy to debug config issues (it's just files in the ./result symlink!)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#436

Post by QuiEgo »

ryandrake wrote: post #309
foobarian wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto required to build apps?

We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.

It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software in the current environment." I assume this is what's happening - people are trying to get their products in customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's less about developers and more about business needs.

Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#437

Post by hn_acc1 »

Aurornis wrote: post #338
random3 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world. We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.

They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows games) and/or with the performance I want.

Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#438

Post by hn_acc1 »

close04 wrote: post #171
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

> We'll have a demand crunch This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud. I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GP…

As someone who has been buying computers for 40+ years, including the 1st gen 3dfx card, etc, this is where I NOPE out of the next upgrade cycle. I am not renting hardware. It's bad enough ISPs are renting modems.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#439

Post by asyx »

tcmart14 wrote: post #382
ryandrake wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.

I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unle…

Yep. I graduated in 2017 and jobs were already mostly web. I’d love to work on native applications but nobody is hiring for that and of course because nobody is hiring for that I don’t have a job like that and the Qt I learnt in university is not gonna get any more relevant over time but I don’t have a good reason to keep that skill up to date and if I have to solve a problem I might as well write a TUI or CLI application because that’s easier than Qt or whatever…

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#440

Post by rkagerer »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

Care to share some more detailed specs?
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