We've gotten more pixels and bytes and flops, that's it. We haven't got more battery life, or faster computers, which is strange because they have orders of magnitude more flops in them.

Casey Muratori showing off the speed of visual studio 6 on a Pentium something after ranting about it: Jump to 36:08 in https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U

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the_pwner224 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> We haven't got more battery life

15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here).

Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago.

And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.

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decimalenough 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges.

Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.

	▲	charcircuit 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can still go a week on a modern phone if you restrict your usage to what you would do on a Nokia brick phone.
	▲	direwolf20 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Does it, though? Unless you go back so far you're talking about fixed–layout b&w LCD screens, the next era after that had games and the internet — what's actually new since that time? Multitasking yes, what else?

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autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Every time we get faster computers we get much much slower software. We get larger hard drives, so software bloats until it takes GBs