Hacker News Reader

Well, the future seems to be in ARM chips. It's quite likely that the developments in the next few years will be about building ARM processors for laptops as powerful as our current non-ARM ones.

This + evolution of battery technology means that in 2020, we might have Macbook Airs roughly as powerful as our current ones (albeit with better GPUs, as that's still evolving pretty fast), but with a battery life at 20+ hours.

View on HN

Battery technology has been the primary bottleneck for technological advancement for awhile now, especially on mobile.

I got rid of all but two of my x86 machines which didn't have AES-NI. One is essentially unused, and the other is my current home theater box, to be replaced with the Late-2013 Mac Mini. AES-NI essentially makes Full Disk Encryption "free", and FDE is a minimum standard for any machine I'd use today.

If iOS gets biometrics, I'd probably feel the same way about it (and fixing the imaging attack is why I upgraded ASAP off the iPhone 4 and iPad 1). If Mac hardware added real trusted boot hardware, I'd probably replace all of mine at the same time, too.

So, not performance, but features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com