Have been thinking of the tech progress with flashlights over the past decade as compared to computers. I can not think of anything particularly bad about the evolution of flashlights. Kind of seems like everything is moving in a positive direction to me. Quality up. Efficiency up. More choices, better CRI and tint choices. Pricing seems at least fair if not decreasing relative to what you are getting. More and better battery choices…
Computers seem like much more of a mixed bag to me. I’ve been a mac guy creating business systems with the so called “toy” mac dating back to a time where my only real competition was system 36 mini computers with dumb terminals. From my perspective the past decade progress in computers has driven more backwards than forwards. (Excepting the financial bottom line of Apple stock holders, Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.) Moore’s law? Sure see no clear evidence like during the decade before last. Energy efficiency. That’s one thing I see that is pretty clearly steadily improving. (The growth of streaming and bitcoin during the period likely eliminates any net benefit from it though.)
The other thing I see clearly improving is Linux. For me at least, during the past decade, it has went from challenging to get working and even then having noticeable rough edges, to it just works and is actually easy to get setup. Perhaps windows is improving as well but from my limited experience the user experience is anything but a clear improvement. The mac world has taken a turn that has become untenable to me. The nearly forced upgrades while making it difficult if not impossible to roll back are simply not something I can live with. When they went to a signed OS that was just a bridge too far for me. Call me crazy, and I may be, but I still believe in the power of personal computers and the internet. That should not depend on a couple of very large corporations to have the power to deny anyone else the ability to run their own systems.
I am not sure where I am going to go from here but I know that I will have to learn a lot more about PC hardware. Have been playing with Linux Mint on a 2011 MacBook Pro. Works great. On a lark I picked up a 2015 ThinkPad for peanuts. Absolutely flawless simple install to get Mint up and running on it. Surprised that the performance was not noticeably different than the much older Mac. However, the battery performance was much improved! Unfortunately I was too ignorant of PC hardware and did not realize that I needed to spend a few more peanuts. Could not believe that in 2015 that display could have been deemed acceptable for a business class laptop. Of course it could have been bought with a decent screen but did not have to have one. Had I realized that and spent just a few more peanuts I would have ended up with a very nice laptop for just a few peanuts. Still ends up being a pretty impressive, responsive, reliable and useful laptop. Just have to leave with a marginal display that has only a few degrees of decent viewing angle. My next try will have to move up to USB C with a decent display and I think a used laptop with Mint will serve me just fine.
Could it be a Pareto 80/20 relationship we’re experiencing?
Compared to their previous manual/analog/function, PC/Laptops have achieved 80% of the advances in the past 40 yrs with the remaining 20% of advancement over the next 40 years. Could it be that PC/Laptops are already delivering 80% of what we expect of such devices, with only 20% unfulfilled? With the current state of the art adequate to support the user applications/interfaces, IOT, gaming, work/learn-from-home, etc,; there is reduced demand for advances specifically in PC/laptops.
Or perhaps the pull for advances has reduced due to a shift - whereas 80% of the computing used to be done on PC/Laptops with 20% on auxilary devices (e.g., printers, scanners. digitizers,…); the role has shifted away from a centralized device (i.e., a PC/Laptop) to the expanded 80% role of complementary computing in a multitude of devices, such as tablets, cellphones, smart devices/cars/appliances, and IOTs.
5 yrs ago I never would have thought I’d find myself considering UI software code for my flashlight; which BTW I flash perfectly adequately using my 12 yr old desktop.
How much more is there to accomplish with computers, you can add more animation, more special effects but most of the basic functions have already been worked out.
And we are finally slowing down Wirth’s law.
As for flashlights we are not near the theoretical output of LEDs yet.
And for cell phones we are nowhere near slowing down Wirth’s law.
The Mac hardware platform has certainly improved over time. The PC hardware platform even more.
I would say that generally the technology has peaked for laptops/notebooks, etc. There’s really not much more to do with miniaturization in these formats and CPU’s are super fast relative to the past. The only thing I see really pushing much in the consumer market is on the GPU side. More with gamers, really. The average person who streams videos and plays a few low intensity games here and there is more than satisfied with computers made even just 6 years ago.
As for displays… business class laptops go for basic display resolution to extend battery life, as portability is key. The present day screens are still power hungry… and so a more media based laptop will cut battery life quite a bit. There’s still breakthroughs being made in displays and in battery tech. Soon we’ll see solid state lithium batteries that are totally safe while even more efficient.
With cellphones, miniaturization is even more key here and there’s still breakthroughs ahead. But the flexible screen is the latest major development. Now, you can have nice portable flip phones reminiscent of a LG Lotus, but where the entire inside is a screen—no tactile keyboard. It actually “folds” in the middle when closed, but there’s no visible seam in the screen. THIS is what I’ve been waiting for. I used to be an LG Lotus owner and I hated the OS on that thing. But everything else was terrific. A folded phone means screen breakage is going to become a much less common occurrence.
My perspective as basically an outsider looking in on the computing world is that microsoft (et al) has spent the last 20 years spoon feeding us consumers tiny little ‘updates’(if they can be called that- really its just changes to make it look like an update) at a morbidly slow pace while in the back rooms where the real work is being done for the defense and spying sector, technology has progressed at an amazing pace. The disparity between what they have and what we get is astounding.
What im getting at is this: the reason computers do not seem to have progressed much in performance or user experience/ ease of use is because they have been putting all of their time, effort, and resources into stuff that we will never see as average consumers. It is strictly for those at the very top of the food chain and kept in tight secrecy.
One of the few places we can see some examples of the disparity between what we have in the pc world and whats really possible is when comparing smartphones to PCs (but even that example is still not really apples to apples because phone technology is 8-10 years old- it’s still just scratching the surface)
I often find it easier and more productive to use my phone or tablet for many tasks that I only used to do on my laptop. So yes, we do have the ability to squeeze the performance of a modest laptop into a phone sized space. So imagine what performance could be had if someone decided to scale it. You might say theres no reason to, but there are so many things that could be possible with a massively more powerful laptop that aren’t at the moment.
The only reason we have smartphone technology available to us now is that someone decided we needed to be spied on and advertised to(sorry to be that guy but it’s pretty obvious to me)
Computer language is the next massive leap and it is whats going to take the computer beyond anything you’ve ever dreamed.
More or less recently I was using a Lenovo B50-70 Windows 10 laptop. It was causing me some trouble with its irritating, big-ass over-sensitive mouse pad, and I disabled it via some standard menu instead of using registry tweaks and such (stupid jackass operating system was not allowing me to disable the thing in device manager, as it should). But after a restart it re-enabled itself again, causing me additional nuisances. So I lost my mind, and gave the laptop a fatal blow. R.I.P.
So I revived my Core2 Duo T5500 HP nx9420 with 2GB of RAM and :-D good 'ol Windows XP (bought in O:) 2005). And despite it being fairly overused, it is a pleasure to remember how nice it still works despite its software lack of support limitations (browser, namely). It opens image files a lot faster than the B50-70 could (I really can't explain how retardedly slow is the default image viewer in Winblows 10), and the behaviour and performance of its desktop and file explorer is equally way ahead. Oh! It's mouse pad is a pleasure to use, much smaller and with a hollow design which completely avoids interference with wrists while typing on the keyboard.
Also took a brief peek at more modern versions of Android (10, 11 and 12 ) recently, and soon went back to my heavily customized and powerful AEX 5.7 Oreo 8.1 ROM.
So could I say that they are trying to take you for a ride with newer versions of software? :facepalm: }( :| …
There has to be something else going on with the efficiency gains. First, the Macs of the same vintage also saw significant efficiency gains. Can’t remember the last time Apple was shipping laptops with a crappy monitor but pretty sure it pre-dates their move to Intel. Second, from looking at some reviews of the model I got, when tested with a decent display, the battery time was reasonably close to the time on units reviewed with the crappy monitor. Pretty sure they use the crappy displays simply because they can get away with it so long as people just want cheaper.
I’ve been using Android since it first came out. My first Android phone was an HTC Hero. I loved that thing. The little track ball was a cool feature. I jumped over to the HTC Evo 3D because of enormous CPU and screen improvements. I’m on a Pixel 5 now and it just blows all of those old phones away. I used to be into custom ROM flashing… which was fun and rewarding, making your phone customized in ways the original maker refused to undertake. But now? Android has come so far. I’m so happy with the default functionality, satisfying my needs well enough. Maybe down the road when the battery is aging, I might flash a ROM that’s more efficient… until the time when a battery replacement is necessary. But by then, I’ll probably have moved onto a flip phone with foldable screen (something I’ve been wanting for 2 decades!)
) recently, and soon went back to my heavily customized and powerful AEX 5.7 Oreo 8.1 ROM.