> There is no price/performance improvement.
Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.
Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
Copying a tiny file at 1.1 MB/s should feel instantaneous. But on Win 10 and Win 11 with an SSD, you can get a multisecond progressbar. And if you dare to cancel this tiny operation (because you chose the wrong destînation or wrong file), you get another progressbar.
Opening a folder window for a local directory with only a few items in it should never trigger a "Working on it…" message. It should be instantaneous.
Searching for filenames with a substring "foo", when an item "foobar" was already visible on the screen, should never result in failing to find "foobar", nor in a long delays before showing any items. VoidTools Everything displays live results as you type. Windows 10/11 often fails on both counts even when searching "indexed" locations; Outook also seems to also suffer from this inability to reliably include in search results items that were already on display. Something is deeply wrong with search.
Devs should be required test against machines hobbled to run at most 10% of rated speed, and to make it buttery smooth.
Would also be nice to have all my screenspace back by being able to turn off what appears to be Simply Enormous Margins & Padding mode…
a 128GB SoC m4 pro max can do pretty wild data science with close to a terabyte/second speed without the latency of typical offloading/back-and-forth
My point being, with time performance might go up. But instead of that making my device faster/long-lasting, developers use that extra performance to cram in more stuff, at the end of which I come out only slightly better if not worse (as is in my case)
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
I think the better way is honestly just to make something competitive, preferably FOSS, and I actually do think we're getting there. Blender, for example, is an extremely decent animation tool nowadays, Krita is a very good digital art program, OpenToonz/Tahoma2D are pretty ok 2D animation programs, Godot is a decent-enough game engine, etc.
Yeah there are still gaps and I'm not claiming everything has parity with everything with awful pricing models, but I think we're getting there, and I think that's a more sustainable model than piracy.