6 ms·
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powe
by jacobgold 4mo ago
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoI'm still using ~10 year old PCs at both work and home. Running linux, still doing fine.
- nosioptar 4mo agoMy 2012 thinkpad still works well. I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
- hamburglar 4mo agoSame. And my current daily driver laptop cost me $400 9 years ago. You can still do a lot for incredibly cheap.
- LeFantome 4mo agoI bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $50 two years ago to take on a backpacking trip. It runs Linux and I use it all the time. I had a video meeting on it this morning. You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
- dominicrose 4mo agoCompared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care
- amlib 4mo agoAnd with modern streaming software like Sunshine/Moonlight you can easily defer high performance tasks to a powerful machine at home. You are truly free to use any device from the last 15 years as a somewhat dumb terminal if you invest some time setting those things up... or even easier if you just need ssh.
- SchemaLoad 4mo agoI'm a fairly proficient linux user and I just can not get streaming to work properly and I've dedicated multiple hours to trying to set it up. The built in Steam streaming gets the closest but often just lags out for no obvious reason. Sunshine/moonlight seem to be close to working but weird display issues are constant. I've got it to the point where the steam big picture video streams perfect but when you launch a game the screen size seems to change where I can only see part of the screen on my target device. Feels like a technology that is theoretically entirely possible but the current implementations need a lot of polish.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoYep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments. I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
- drnick1 4mo ago> I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail. That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.
- lightedman 4mo agoThe B580 barely competes with a GTX1080, which I am still using. the idea of buying a new modern card having barely the performance of a card from a decade ago seems absurd on its face.
- drnick1 4mo ago> The B580 barely competes with a GTX1080, which I am still using. That's nonsense, the B580 is substantially faster. https://howmanyfps.com/graphics-cards/comparisons/geforce-gtx-1080-vs-arc-b580 https://howmanyfps.com/graphics-cards/comparisons/geforce-gt...
- lightedman 4mo agoI own both - there is a lot of work Arc's drivers need done to them to actually be able to use their supposed theoretical power. My GTX 1080 delivers more consistent framerates with less stuttering versus the B580. Speed means nothing when you aren't delivering consistency.
- my002 4mo agoI mean, surely this depends on what games you want to play. If you're playing mostly indies and retro games, an older desktop will be fine. If you want to play new AAA releases, probably much less so.
- drnick1 4mo agoI recently liberated a couple of old Intel Mac laptops by installing Linux. These machines were not receiving system updates anymore. Even on the older machine with a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM, GNOME runs well (XFCE would probably be a better choice to save RAM for programs, though). On the newer T2 machine with 8GB of RAM, GNOME feels basically as snappy as on my modern gaming PC.
- normie3000 4mo agoTry Google Meet. I have a similar spec Air, and that's where it falls down :'-(
- lightedman 4mo agoGoogle Meet is trash. Camfrog from over a decade ago trashes it, Zoom, and any other multi-camera meeting room software. I was watching over 150 video streams at once on a Pentium 4 using Camfrog, and now you can't even have more than 5-10 before a computer starts choking. What garbage.
- bartvk 4mo agoDo you use Discord? How much time does it take to start it?
- RankingMember 4mo agoOh boy, that app. I only use it once in a while, and it's slower and more enshittified every time. The last time I opened it, there was now a Verizon ad in the bottom left-hand corner asking me to watch a 30 second video to "win 200 Orbs!", whatever the hell that means.
- zahlman 4mo agoThe website version works fine.
- mysterydip 4mo agoThe computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
- jy14898 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)#May's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- baron816 4mo agoThe tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
- AceJohnny2 4mo ago> instead of unobservably better performance That's... quite the choice of words there
- alex7o 4mo agoThe problem Is when the performance problems becomes observable. Only after a specific scenario like low power mode for example
- vlan0 4mo agoWhich is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality. It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
- kylec 4mo agoAnd yet in some ways, modern computers feel slower than those from decades ago. Software today is so, so much less efficient than it was back then.
- criddell 4mo agoIn some meaningful ways they are measurably slower. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- ray__ 4mo agoGreat article. This is the kind of web design that I like.
- russfink 4mo agoUntil recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.
- sscaryterry 4mo agoYes and no. Faster hardware doesn’t solve pathologically broken algorithms :)
- fragmede 4mo agoWorth's law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
- sscaryterry 4mo agoYep, and its nothing new :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- fragmede 4mo ago
- snootypoot 4mo agoits worth noting that you were much less restricted with this 6k computer in 1996. today we are paying ever more for walled gardens that will eventually become nothing more than a portal to cloud services. we are not returning to a previous position, we are moving to a world where everything will be a thin client.
- cyberlurker 4mo agoTrue but you can also buy a RPI or other cheap computer and do literally whatever you want with it. Those walled gardens and portals serve a purpose for many users who don’t care about being restricted for the benefits that come with it.
- amelius 4mo agoYeah but these computers don't have sota performance by maybe more than a factor of 10. So an unfair comparison.
- AbsurdCensor 4mo agoWere you? That $6k Apple in 1996 was just as 'walled garden' as it is now.
- platevoltage 4mo agoIf we are talking specifically about Macs, I remember my Mac in 1996 didn't even have a command line interface.
- fl4regun 4mo agodepends on what the computer is, I'm running a desktop with linux, is there really anything I can't do on my computer that was possible in 1996?
- joe_mamba 4mo ago> is there really anything I can't do on my computer that was possible in 1996? Use dial-up internet and SCSI drives?
- greenleafone7 4mo agoI agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes. So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
- spdionis 4mo agoI mean truck drivers make much more money than you'd think.
- silverquiet 4mo agoHow much do they make?
- throwawaytea 4mo agoThere's many types. I sold Audi/Porsche and every now and then I'd sell a fancy car to a FedEx driver type that does long haul runs to other states (with a team driver next to him), and he'd be making $150k a year+. Not bad for 4 days a week work, and ability to live in a slightly lower cost area. Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
- silverquiet 4mo agoI ran it by Gemini, and it says that the top 10% earn more than $78,800 annually. I believe your experience is with the top end of the distribution.
- throwawaytea 4mo agoWell California automatically pays more than most of the country. And I believe FedEx has some Union drivers. And yes, just like the average software engineer salary isn't all that dang high, when we discuss the industry we tend to look at the most successful group we aspire to be in, not the burnouts that aren't that good at their job.
- pupppet 4mo agoComputers got cheap due to necessity. The necessity is still there and raising prices is a rug pull.
- epolanski 4mo agoThe expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs. You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10? Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens. So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade. Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later! This is absolute madness we have never seen.
- ghshephard 4mo agoM3 Ultra w/512 GB was released 1 year ago for $9500. I bought one (with a friend's Apple Employee Discount) and originally had a bit of buyer's remorse, because performance was less than some of the Cloud Providers - but recent releases of the quantized GLM 5.2 models are actually pretty speedy and are probably as good or better than any online model I had a year ago - and the discontinuation of the M3 512 has erased that remorse finally.
- paxys 4mo agoYou may have equivalent power on that $6 computer but can you run the same applications?
- jacobgold 4mo agoIn my case, yes, because I used to be a Linux user. I still am, but I used to be too. Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.
- platevoltage 4mo agoI'm sure you can find an equivalent to ClarisWorks or Photoshop 3.0 that works on a Raspberry Pi.
- simondotau 4mo agoBut you cannot, I promise you, buy a raspberry pi for $6. Not even remotely close.
- platevoltage 4mo agoObviously. I assumed that was hyperbole given that you can’t buy any SBC for $6
- simondotau 4mo agoEven $60 would be hyperbole for a SBC intended for productivity software.
- AIorNot 4mo agoWell Conversely, in 1996 you, your spouse, your kids, didnt need a pc to live your lives - having a pc or mac was something of a luxury Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
- zdragnar 4mo ago> having a pc or mac was something of a luxury Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
- xxpor 4mo agoThe MacBook Neo (at least pre announcement) was a better value than anything else, including a chromebook.
- amlib 4mo agoAnd if you spent all that money on a single computer there was the expectation of sharing it with the whole family.
- breezeTrowel 4mo ago1996 was 30 years ago. What about comparing prices from 3 years ago? 2023 vs 2026.
- bellowsgulch 4mo agoAnd software is now so cheap, or free, that it's incredibly difficult to even start and maintain a single-member LLC software business.
- oceanyblues 4mo agoOrdinary people do not buy devices for their computing power, they buy them for their utility. People will look at this and see only a device that delivers the exact same utility as before, but now with higher cost.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bubbi 4mo ago[dead]
- throw0101d 4mo agoSee perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article): There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket. So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone. * All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box. * AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone. * In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone. * Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone. * Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone. * VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone. * Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs. * Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone. * 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95. * Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone. * 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone. * Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail. * Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily. * BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book? You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. * https://archive.is/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973 https://archive.is/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shac... That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_TL_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...
- Retric 4mo agoA CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc. But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
- echoangle 4mo agoWow, I didn't know that Camcorders were that expensive at the time. That's $2k today according to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm .
- as1mov 4mo agoThat's great, but then can you ask the manufacturers of the devices to support them for 20 years? Raw numbers mean jack shit if the device itself is completely abandoned and cannot run any applications. Banking, authentication and bunch of services require the device to be on the latest iOS/Android version, which is hard to do because the manufacturer dropped it like a hot brick after 5 years.
- eatsyourtacos 4mo agoThat is such an unfair comparison though. The reason we are now getting completely screwed on consumer electronics is because massive corporations just get to bully around the rest of the world and we have zero control over it. Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
- dd8601fn 4mo agoAs I understood it, chipmakers aren’t scaling up in record time because the last few times they did that the market fell out from under them, and a bunch of them went out of business. If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
- koolba 4mo agoAnytime inflation comes up and the relative power of computing devices is mentioned, I remember the classic[1] line that you can’t eat an iPad. Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-gets-feds-dudley-an-earful-idUSTRE72A4AC/ https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...
- cyanydeez 4mo agoit'd be more instructive to compare what you get from apple silicon compared to x86 and ARM.
- fragmede 4mo agoWhat you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.
- throwaway613746 4mo ago[dead]
- zamadatix 4mo agoPerformance was flying in the 90s. The last 1-2 decades if you bought a top end computer it'd easily last you the decade before it started to drag behind average. 3 decades ago if you bought a computer it'd reach the same point in 2-3 years. I.e. computing is cheap compared to the past, but it only makes it that much more painful we went from "it'll be so much faster soon!" to "at least it's cheaper than it used to be" and now to "oh wow, it's like the reverse 90s these last 2-3 years!".
- bombcar 4mo agoI paid about $6k two days ago for a machine that's now above $8k. I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- steve_adams_86 4mo agoI had a similar thought. I bought a computer for $3600 CAD 3 years ago and it shows no signs of limiting my work in any way. I have another from 2020 from my employer that is just fine, likely costing them about $2500 CAD when they bought it. Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care. I do care that the prices are a reasonable reflection of market realities and that their profit margins aren't expanded compared to the last several years', but assuming these increases are actually necessary: okay.
- TrackerFF 4mo agoWe paid like $3500 in 1995 money for a PC which was completely outdated after 4 years. The early to mid 90s were exciting times, but damn some of the machines were expensive and didn't last long.
- xlayn 4mo agoAnother perspective, if you compare it to two years ago, how much more expensive is it and how much better? we are paying the sAIm Taxltman. Just see, you could buy the steam deck for 250 refurbished 2 years ago, now it's what 700$? Try to buy 2 64GB dims of ram.
- downrightmike 4mo agoThat was a niche product, these are mass market consumables.
- matthoiland 4mo agoI gladly paid $1,499 for an iBook G4 in 2005. (~$2,572 inflation adjusted)
- chrisweekly 4mo agounc?
- failingforward 4mo ago“unc” is the new “boomer”
- sudokatsu 4mo agoNah unc is kinda charming, boomer often had a derisive connotation.
- adrian_b 4mo agoThe perspective changes a lot when comparing with the prices of one year ago, or even with the prices of 10 years ago. During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
- danans 4mo agoAnother unc perspective: As that compute has become cheap, the value of what you can do with that compute, and sell in exchange for money, has also diminished. I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
- mancerayder 4mo agoSoftware was leaner! Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
- xdennis 4mo ago> However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap. Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized. Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer. Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
- byzantinegene 4mo agowhy not compare the prices a couple years ago instead?
- HerbManic 4mo agoI think it was Jeff Geerling who brought back an Apple G5 server, very cool. But someone pointed out you could twice the performance out of a Raspberry Pi 5 and only use 5 watts doing it. Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
- toasty228 4mo agoAnd you can buy the compute power equivalent to the entire NASA Apollo program for $15, now what?
- bjord 4mo agostart launching moon missions, what else?
- doe88 4mo agoBut back then the contemporaneous llm was the single digit mb file word_list.txt.
- jayd16 4mo agoWhat would be the relative power scaled equivalent today and what would that cost? It's easy enough to build a $10k rig. Apple sells a studio that's closer to $7k.
- ksec 4mo agoI am so glad this finally get mentioned and at least upvoted on HN. Many are taking hardware improvements and cheap pricing as granted. Not to mention a lot of these price hikes will need to major improvements in the coming years that were either previously not possible / sustainable or pulled in a few years forward.
- Valakas_ 4mo agoThat perspective is misleading. By that logic someone in 1960 would have to pay $100k to have a vacuum computer that is equivalent to a random calculator today. So then any price below $100k is ok for a calculator and we shouldn't complain :).