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Exponentials have a bad habit of turning into sigmoids due to fundamental physical and geometric, and also practical, constraints. There’s the thing called dimi

Exponentials have a bad habit of turning into sigmoids due to fundamental physical and geometric, and also practical, constraints. There’s the thing called diminishing returns. Every proven technology reaches maturity; it happened to iPods, it happened to smartphones, it happened to digital cameras and so on. There’s still growth and improvement, but it’s greatly slowed down from the early days. But that’s not to say that there won’t be other sigmoids to come. If you haven’t noticed how growth in storage capacity of HDDs in general screeched to a relative halt around fifteen years ago? The doubling period used to be about 12-14 months; every three or four years the unit cost of capacity would decrease 90%. This continued through the 90s and early 2000s, and then it started slowing down. A lot. In 2005 I bought a 250 GB HDD; at the same price I’d now get something like a 15 EB drive if the time constant had stayed, well, constant. There is, of course, always a multitude of interdependent variables to optimize, and you can always say that growth of X slowed down because priorities changed to optimize Y instead. But why did the priorities change? Almost certainly at least partislly because further optimization of X was becoming expensive or impractical. > quality has been growing exponentially That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality.

csours 2y ago
> rigorous way to quantify quality. Most rigorous definitions of quality incorporate a target expectation that is impossible to exceed. You are removing errors, so best case, exponential improvement in quality adds nines - a la the sigmoid function you mention.
roenxi 2y ago
> That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality. We have a qualitative measure of quantity, that was where the discussion started - size in bytes. Storage size in bytes on a pocket iDevice seems to be growing exponentially. Brooks said it stopped doubling and I don't think that is true. iDevices are still doubling their storage size every 2-4 years or so and have been for a while. There was a one-time change to SSDs where they lost a few generations and they are only up to 1TB instead of 160TB (suggesting SSDs are around 7 generations behind HDD which seems reasonable on the face of it to me). But apart from that it has been a pretty steady doubling every few years. His claim was that iPods didn't get to 160TB because it "nobody actually needed more than that" and that observation is misunderstanding what happened. Apple switched from HDD to SSD because SSD is a much better fit and put the rate of growth back by a few generations but the growth is still ongoing and probably will reach 100s of TB sooner or later. He was right that iPods didn't need >a few gig of storage ... but that just meant Apple discontinued the iPod brand and replaced it with iPhones, where there is no usage barrier to consuming terabytes of storage. They were obsoleted by the very trend he claimed was over! It appears Apple thinks people did need more, because they aren't making iPods any more.

csours 2y ago

> rigorous way to quantify quality. Most rigorous definitions of quality incorporate a target expectation that is impossible to exceed. You are removing errors, so best case, exponential improvement in quality adds nines - a la the sigmoid function you mention.

roenxi 2y ago

> That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality. We have a qualitative measure of quantity, that was where the discussion started - size in bytes. Storage size in bytes on a pocket iDevice seems to be growing exponentially. Brooks said it stopped doubling and I don't think that is true. iDevices are still doubling their storage size every 2-4 years or so and have been for a while. There was a one-time change to SSDs where they lost a few generations and they are only up to 1TB instead of 160TB (suggesting SSDs are around 7 generations behind HDD which seems reasonable on the face of it to me). But apart from that it has been a pretty steady doubling every few years. His claim was that iPods didn't get to 160TB because it "nobody actually needed more than that" and that observation is misunderstanding what happened. Apple switched from HDD to SSD because SSD is a much better fit and put the rate of growth back by a few generations but the growth is still ongoing and probably will reach 100s of TB sooner or later. He was right that iPods didn't need >a few gig of storage ... but that just meant Apple discontinued the iPod brand and replaced it with iPhones, where there is no usage barrier to consuming terabytes of storage. They were obsoleted by the very trend he claimed was over! It appears Apple thinks people did need more, because they aren't making iPods any more.