3 ms·

"Computers are the only significant commodity to ever get progressively cheaper as they get better, throughout their entire history". It seems to me like most

"Computers are the only significant commodity to ever get progressively cheaper as they get better, throughout their entire history". It seems to me like most things get cheaper as they get better. At least anything that benefits from improvements to a manufacturing process, economies of scale and iterated design... which is most mass manufactured goods.

schoen 9y ago
Other examples might be clothing, furniture, food, and batteries. There are arguments to be made about the first three and they might be pretty instructive arguments. One issue is whether we're looking at "what you can get for $50", "what is the best one ever made (in some respect)", "what is a typical one that people from a particular social class would buy", or still other ways of segmenting markets.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
I think it's just rare that there's ever a gap as big as there has been with computers between the first prototype and the current consumer grade equipment. Ignoring for a moment the per cycle efficiency increase (which is non-trivial and adds a couple orders of magnitude extra), a modern CPU is ~500,000 times faster than ENIAC was, which was itself a ~1,000 times faster than other computing solutions at the time, at a cost of $6,500,000 to $100. So per dollar, you're getting 32 billion times the computer. It's actually more like a trillion times the computer if you count in per-instruction efficiency gains. Yeah, we get better at most things, but almost no other thing have we gotten so much explosively better at it than computers. You can argue clothes, screws, cars, shoes, whatever are better now than they used to be. Maybe they are. But they're not a billion times better per dollar. I suspect that most of them strain to be a thousand times better per dollar.
- Pamar 9y ago
  What about cars? Or planes?
  - biofox 9y ago
    One of the first consumer cars is considered to be the Benz Patent-Motorwagen [1]. Adjusted price: $3,998 Maximum speed: 10 mph The improvements in performance and price are not even those seen in computers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  Computers are a billion times faster but I can't see how my current computer (Acer 725, AMD dual core, 1 GHz 4GB ram, 0.5 TB disk) is a billion times better than my first computer (Nascom 2, Z80 8 bit, 4 MHz, 16 kB ram). Yes, it's much better and no I wouldn't want to go back to the state of computing in 1981, but I think that calculation speed is a poor proxy for degree of improvement.

schoen 9y ago

Other examples might be clothing, furniture, food, and batteries. There are arguments to be made about the first three and they might be pretty instructive arguments. One issue is whether we're looking at "what you can get for $50", "what is the best one ever made (in some respect)", "what is a typical one that people from a particular social class would buy", or still other ways of segmenting markets.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

I think it's just rare that there's ever a gap as big as there has been with computers between the first prototype and the current consumer grade equipment. Ignoring for a moment the per cycle efficiency increase (which is non-trivial and adds a couple orders of magnitude extra), a modern CPU is ~500,000 times faster than ENIAC was, which was itself a ~1,000 times faster than other computing solutions at the time, at a cost of $6,500,000 to $100. So per dollar, you're getting 32 billion times the computer. It's actually more like a trillion times the computer if you count in per-instruction efficiency gains. Yeah, we get better at most things, but almost no other thing have we gotten so much explosively better at it than computers. You can argue clothes, screws, cars, shoes, whatever are better now than they used to be. Maybe they are. But they're not a billion times better per dollar. I suspect that most of them strain to be a thousand times better per dollar.

Pamar 9y ago
What about cars? Or planes?
- biofox 9y ago
  One of the first consumer cars is considered to be the Benz Patent-Motorwagen [1]. Adjusted price: $3,998 Maximum speed: 10 mph The improvements in performance and price are not even those seen in computers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen
kwhitefoot 9y ago
Computers are a billion times faster but I can't see how my current computer (Acer 725, AMD dual core, 1 GHz 4GB ram, 0.5 TB disk) is a billion times better than my first computer (Nascom 2, Z80 8 bit, 4 MHz, 16 kB ram). Yes, it's much better and no I wouldn't want to go back to the state of computing in 1981, but I think that calculation speed is a poor proxy for degree of improvement.