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> Really makes the M1 Ultra look affordable. The amount of power you can buy today for under $1000 let alone under $10000 is insane compared to back then. The
by api 5y ago
> Really makes the M1 Ultra look affordable.
The amount of power you can buy today for under $1000 let alone under $10000 is insane compared to back then. The M1 Ultra is not that expensive compared to mid-range workstations or even high-end PCs of previous eras.
- paulmd 5y agoYeah, I don't quite get the way people sometimes reminisce about the hardware costs of the past. We used to have consumer CPUs topping $1000 back when that was some serious money, and big-boy graphics workstations could easily run the tens or hundreds of thousands.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoNon-toy computers were only available to the relatively wealthy for nearly a decade. The original Apple II was the equivalent of around $5000, which certainly wasn't a casual purchase for most people. If you look in back-issues of Byte the prices of early PCs with a usable spec are eye-watering, even before correcting for inflation. Prices didn't start dropping to more accessible levels until the 90s.
- rodgerd 5y agoAn Irix workstation is like buying a Countach. It's a thing you have because it's the thing that you always wanted.
- vidarh 5y agoI used to run an e-mail service with ~2m user accounts '99-'01. Our storage was an IBM ESS "Shark" stocked with 1.5TB of drives and two RS/6000 servers as the storage controllers. Add on web frontends and mail exchangers, and the entire system was slower and had less aggregate RAM and processing power, less (and slower) disk (well SSD in my laptop) than my current $1500 laptop.