I think ESR is ignorant of the computing needs for large swathes of people he has little-to-no interaction with. My guess is he's never seen a real video editin

I think ESR is ignorant of the computing needs for large swathes of people he has little-to-no interaction with. My guess is he's never seen a real video editing setup (my system cost over $15K and makes his Beast look positively anemic), "enthusiast" gamer system (typical buildout costs start at $3K and go up rapidly depending on your GPU budget), or even the typical engineer that has a system which probably cost $2K+ and regularly works pretty hard depending on what tools they use to do their job. All of that said, despite his ignorance of the demands these users have, he's right that they represent a very small percentage of all computing done today, and the "middle" tier computer is getting hollowed out by people moving down to smaller devices. I'm not sure there's anything insightful to this, though: this has been happening for over 10 years now. Worse, it's a re-play of the same trend from the 90's with high performance workstations moving from expensive enterprise-only systems to Intel, which itself is a re-play of the same trend with the intro of the PC in the 80's. Computing gets smaller, cheaper and (largely) slower -- by the standards of the stuff it's replacing, anyway.