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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

The phenomenon that ultimately put down the Concorde is actually seen all the time everywhere in everyday life: Bleeding edge performance and tech is almost never economically practical, it's always the stuff well within the margins with room to spare that ultimately define the space.

See for other examples: The 500 Kei Shinkansen, literally every Intel Core i9 and AMD Ryzen 9 CPU, sports and luxury cars, Boeing 747 "Queen of the Skies" Jumbo and Airbus A380, the Space Shuttle, the F-22 Raptor, and more.

All very impressive pieces of tech and their achievements shouldn't be discounted, but all ultimately an interesting footnote in history as significantly more inferior and practical pieces of tech dominate.

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The 747 was manufactured for 50 years and over 1,500 of them were made. It’s difficult to put it in the same category with Concorde and the Space Shuttle.

The 747 still has demand as a cargo plane. I bet we see them flown for a long time to come, with most remaining passenger configs gradually being converted to cargo.

They do get replaced by (converted) B777s and cargo A350s so. The 747 still will have a place, especially for long and heavy loads so.

> literally every Intel Core i9

But today’s i9 is tomorrow’s i7 and the i5 the day after tomorrow. So it has its place in the story

Given they are sold every generation, they must be practical to enough people. There are quite a lot of multithreaded tasks that can use so many cores.

I haven't been keeping track lately, but these used to be "the i7, but squeeze out an extra 500MHz by adding another hundred watts", usually; has this changed?

Yeah pretty much that. They usually have the same amount of performance cores but there are more efficient cores and hence threads and on top of that they run on higher frequency too

i7-14700K: 20 cores (8 performance, 12 efficient) 28 threads 5.6 Ghz

i9-14900K: 24 cores (8 performance, 16 efficient) 32 threads 6 Ghz

It's like ~10% performance difference

It was not just not economically practical: it wasn't practical.

Yes, the flights were shorter, but between 9 hours cramped in a tight fuselage with little entertainment and 12 hours in a comfortable chair with headroom and entertainment, I would have taken the latter. There's a sweet spot abive the even more comfortable but vastly slower passenger liners, but Concorde was too extreme - and I guess the suborbital flights imagined by Musk are too far too.

It is incredibly cramped inside. I stepped into one in Duxford museum and especially the windows are tiny, the looking at the curvature of the earth thing would have been pretty hard.

https://external-preview.redd.it/K5Z9Kd7AkxJz-eQm5I97pZYIDTa...

My dad traveled to the UK all the time through JFK. He got upgraded to the Concorde once and his reaction was that he actually preferred first class on a 747--and that was at a time with less comfortable seating than exists today. Very few people really benefit from the faster flight time, especially if it doesn't have the range to do trans-Pacific.

As you say, ocean liners are mostly too slow for anyone who is working but I was surprised to learn recently that they're not necessarily much more expensive than a business class flight.

Comparing chips in this context doesn't work, especially with Ryzen, where, due to chiplets, the effect of yields on price is mitigated significantly.

They're higher margin products, not products that cost so much to make that they'd have to be priced so high.

Not forgetting the Apollo program.

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