However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
That's... quite the choice of words there
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.
The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling.
But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.
(You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)
Utilitarian laptops need to come back yesterday.
Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.
https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t...
So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.
(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)
If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.
What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
Or the single app that slows it down.
I had a brand new experience today. I emailed someone explaining to "right-click, then…" and got a reply saying that they are left-handed, so my instructions were not applicable for them.
Average consumers, for the most part, have a magic box. Only when someone is motivated to learn, like wanting to have a better gaming experience or having an interest in media production (or code), is there incentive to learn.
iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it.
Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them.
One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.
Then I can click it to open a dropdown that ranks the top 5 processes of each category (CPU, MEM, NET) and the amount they are consuming.
It's this kind of thing that should be built in to the OS. Makes it trivial to eyeball whether something unexpected is going on.
But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.
>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs
I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:
When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.
When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.
I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.
If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."
The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.
This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!
To be fair, one could say the same for Zig, but Ghostty does extremely well in this regards. While it maybe doesn't have the same complexity that Zed does, it does have to deal with a lot of historical cruft of terminal emulation...
The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.
I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)
You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.
What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.
Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.
Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.
> the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough
Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.
> average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care
When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.
If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.
The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.
Clearly at least $100 (not adjusted for inflation) based on trends from 1990-2015.
Peoples primary reason for upgrading computer was better performance for years, after all.
It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.
Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.
The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.
They can't. They have no clue how. Electron is all they know and I doubt they can learn anything else.
Also AI clearly hasn't replaced developers since the AI companies are also using electron and generating very buggy software.
"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."
https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...
Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
Built natively, the same app could use an order of magnitude less memory, while being functionally identical.
As to what its doing with all those extra resources on your linux box... shrug maybe using your laptop to train its models or mine crypto?
There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.
Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.
So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”.
Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.
I bet he hated that he had to talk about it.
Or 3 modern Electron apps.
If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...
I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
Feels like a technology that is theoretically entirely possible but the current implementations need a lot of polish.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.
the idea of buying a new modern card having barely the performance of a card from a decade ago seems absurd on its face.
That's nonsense, the B580 is substantially faster.
https://howmanyfps.com/graphics-cards/comparisons/geforce-gt...
Speed means nothing when you aren't delivering consistency.
I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.
I too built a budget gaming machine last year with a ryzen whatever it is cpu, 16GB of DDR4 and a radeon rx470 or 489 with 8GB of ram. I ignore news about new games and only buy games that are on sale and less than 20€ and everything works fine. These are AAA but not newly released ones. For example I recently started playing Skyrim for example.
You don't miss what you haven't tried.
What garbage.
Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
I.e. computing is cheap compared to the past, but it only makes it that much more painful we went from "it'll be so much faster soon!" to "at least it's cheaper than it used to be" and now to "oh wow, it's like the reverse 90s these last 2-3 years!".
Use dial-up internet and SCSI drives?
Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.
Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.
Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.
Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care.
I do care that the prices are a reasonable reflection of market realities and that their profit margins aren't expanded compared to the last several years', but assuming these increases are actually necessary: okay.
I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
Not to mention a lot of these price hikes will need to major improvements in the coming years that were either previously not possible / sustainable or pulled in a few years forward.
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
This is absolute madness we have never seen.
Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
It's easy enough to build a $10k rig. Apple sells a studio that's closer to $7k.
There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
* All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone.
That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28, 346 comments)
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
I believe your experience is with the top end of the distribution.
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.