It is absolutely picking a narrative.
Really? About the only reason why I'm getting a new phone every so often is when the old one stops being updated. (My Nexus 4 lasted 3 years, and it would have done another year.)
Planned obsolescence, if you want.
Incidentally I had a HTC Desire HD before and that became unusable on newer versions, as is the Nexus 7 now. These two clearly didn't have the good enough hardware specs.
Also, I play some games on my phone, and having better hardware helps a lot with that.
I could see how infrared sensor like in that new Caterpillar phone could come in useful especially if you are in a building trade, but fingerprint scanner?
You have to get a phone with one and use it for a week or so until its use becomes routine to really understand how big of a game changer it is. I subconsciously unlock my phone now every time I pick it up. It's amazing. Every day it saves me probably 60 seconds in total typing in stupid PINs, and those savings add up real quickly.
They sold off their ARM processors to Marvell. They've made various forays into wireless, though WiMAX didn't work out so well for them.
http://www.epi.org/publication/the-class-of-2015/ For young college graduates, the unemployment rate is currently 7.2 percent (compared with 5.5 percent in 2007), and the underemployment rate is 14.9 percent (compared with 9.6 percent in 2007).
Things have really levelled out for average loads even developer loads (mostly do web dev, run vagrant machines that kind of thing).
I can't see me upgrading til this thing dies tbh.
I'm really looking forwards to VR if it catches on though, having an insanely high resolution headset so I can dump multiple monitors for programming is a big win, combine that with something that has the portability/form factor of a MS Book/Macbook Pro and you'd be able to program as capably from a hotel room as at your desk at home/work.
That would be the biggest shift in my work habits since I went from Windows to Linux in the late 90's.
Also I think once everyone can get down to the same size as intel we might start seeing more exotic architectures, Intel has often won with the "with enough thrust a brick will fly" approach to engineering, it doesn't matter if your chip is clock for clock more efficient if Intel is operating at a level where they can put 5 times as many transistors down in the same unit area and ramp the clock speed way up.
Mostly it's about shuttling around 4 times as much memory for each screen as well as 4 times as much processing.
1920x1080 has ~ 2 million pixels. 3840x2160 has ~ 8 million pixels.
Internally iirc this is often done as vectors before been rasterised out and having various filters and shaders applied but that step requires that you store multiple buffers etc, same reason a card that will play a game just comfortably at 1024x768 will run away crying at 1920x1080 I guess.
My i7 desktop will be four years old in June. I've done the research and all I need to run the Oculus or HTC Vive (or the upcoming games that look good) is a graphics card upgrade.
I would like to compare CPU's with roads: Roads increase traffic, not the other way around. So if you make a faster CPU, the demand for a faster CPU increases.
So if Intel stops making faster CPU's, the demand will (unexpectedly) go down.
Good pick: it's still one of the faster chips around. However, it's TDP is 95W, which is fine for a desktop. Since then, Intel has been concentrating on delivering the same (or, often, much less) speed with lower TDP ratings.
These address the market need for thin, high-priced laptops -- preferably without fans -- that you can use in Starbucks.
You could "upgrade" to a new Intel Core i7-6600U that's actually slower than your i5-2500K but has a TDP of only 15W.
But I got tired of 190F slowly being pumped out of my case and into the room. Its replacement is finally on the way. I preordered Intel's Skull Canyon NUC[0]. Got 32GB of DDR4-2800Mhz memory and a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro PCIE/NVME M.2 SSD. I'll be dailychaining a single DisplayPort cable to 3 new LCDs as well.
Pretty huge leap in performance. It just made sense to stop building new computers and jump on the NUC bandwagon. All I do is development, League of Legends and the rare CSGo. The ~Geforce 750 performance levels that NUC will provide will be enough. The inclusion of the Thunderbolt3 port for an external GPU case really put my mind at ease. Not that I intend to utilize it, but I'm glad it's there. Same upgradability as any other machine. SSD/RAM/GPU. The CPU is soldered, but I never once replaced a CPU after building a computer anyway. Other than the few Athlons I killed from overclocking in ~2001.
Probably upgrade more often if these new gaming NUCs are as good as I think they'll be. Next upgrade for me will be 10nm + Thunderbolt4 NUC. And the final perk, all-Intel so it'll work great with any Linux distro natively. That's worth a lot to me.
Unless Intel failed hard with this thing, which I highly doubt.. it's Intel.. I'm all-in on NUCs from here on out.
[0]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102...
The automotive industry faced the same issue a long time ago, and their solution was to turn cars into a fashion statement. You no longer upgrade your car because your old one is worn out, you upgrade to signal your wealth through conspicuous consumption. The mobile phone market is somewhat the same way. The desktop PC market? Not so much.
There is some legitimate utility derived from novelty -- I don't want to be walking around in my grandfather's battered rags either -- but I wonder if some day we can shift towards something more sustainable and less paying to dig consumerist holes then paying again to fill them back in.
The point about your grandad's battered rags is that they're battered rags, though, not that they're old. His good leather jacket is probably still perfectly serviceable today.
I'd assume these acquisitions added to revenues.....