Re:Mary Quant, ‘60s designer who invented the miniskirt, dea...
by tonyarkles on Thursday April 13, 2023 @10:53PM
(#35564993)
My wife still uses a C2D Macbook Pro (with an SSD and 16GB RAM upgrade, if I recall correctly). It’s totally fine for most of the work she does with it. While I needed to get a beefier laptop for the work I’m doing now (involving processing TB-sized datasets), my 2014 Mac Mini (also with an SSD upgrade) still lives happily on my desk connected to a 4K monitor.
Yeah, that steep climb was amazing! Going from 3kB of RAM, to 640kB of RAM, to 16MB of RAM, to 1GB, to 16GB was incredible. I remember my first dual CPU computer and being blown away that I could burn a CD, listen to music, and play Counterstrike at the same time (Abit BP6, 2x Celeron 450s). Maybe if I still gamed I’d be more blown away by how much things continue to evolve but in a lot of ways the newer CPUs and more RAM etc. mostly just feel like a way to compensate for increasingly bloated software in my day-to-day “office work” activities.
Think about it: Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer CPUs are still perfectly practical to use today for all everyday tasks if we put aside arbitrary software limitations (read: Windows 11). Go and install Windows 10 on a Sandy Bridge, it'll be just as practically-performant as the latest Raptor Lake for all your everyday computing needs.
It's kind of interesting to look back when you're one of the guys who also witnessed the mindblowing advances in computing we had in the 90s and 00s (like you and me). The steep climb, followed by the leveling off.