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The reason computers don't stay equally useful for decades is because much of a computer's usefulness comes from communicating with other computers.

Go back and buy a computer from the 80s, and it's about as useful now as it was then. Buy one from the 90s, and that's still true for tasks that can be done entirely on that computer, but not so much for getting online.

Your iPad 1 is about as useful as it ever was when it comes to doing things that only involve the iPad. It's just that most things it could do want to talk to other computers, and those other computers haven't stayed static.

Find a computer that doesn't need to talk to the world, and you'll find a computer that can stay relevant for a long time. Every 20-year-old car on the road has 20-year-old computers in it still going strong, for example. But if you want a computer to both stay useful and derive its usefulness from the world, then you need the world to stop changing, and that won't happen.

To add to that, old computers can still run old software just fine. Assuming it wasn't left somewhere moist and that you swap out the motherboard battery (which isn't really even necessary), a two decade old dell could just run windows 98 with office 95 or whatever it was back then just fine.

It makes sense that you'd have to upgrade hardware to use new software...

Spot on. My Atari ST is just as useful as it was 25 years ago!

I think we're getting there for laptops. At the risk of sounding like 640kb is enough for anyone:

- CPU clock rate has leveled off, mobile processors have been 2-4 threads for a while now and focus more on power efficiency

- 600MB/sec SSDs are kind of 'fast enough' with regards to app loading and boot times

- retina displays are as good as anyone can see

- the GPU is fast enough to draw a moderately 3D GUI

- battery life is longer than an 8 hour work day

- these days the power adapter is heavier than an ultralight

I think computers are starting to last longer and longer before going obsolete on a practical level. What we're seeing now is more like planned obsolescence, where new designs and form factors are getting introduced but the computer is more or less the same.

There are also some classic designs that last multiple years with minor refreshes much like a calculator: MacBook Air, XPS13, some thinkpads, the 10" and 7" iPad

Major video codecs still change every 5 to 10 years. Even Youtube can be largely unusable on otherwise serviceable old hardware because there is no or outdated hardware assist for decoding video.

Since CPUs and soon GPUs will level out, then at least crypto and video will be pushed into hardware blocks meant to encode/decode them. Churn in functionality requiring hardware assist will probably keep us buying some new hardware at least once and probably twice a decade.

> Major video codecs still change every 5 to 10 years. Even Youtube can be largely unusable on otherwise serviceable old hardware because there is no or outdated hardware assist for decoding video.

Something that is downright crazy given how long NTSC and PAL stayed in use.

But then i live in Norway, where we are in the process of shutting down FM broadcasts in favor of DAB. Except that DAB has already been superseded by DAB+, and if you go a DAB radio early on you will have to toss that one and get a new one.

> 600MB/sec SSDs are kind of 'fast enough' with regards to app loading and boot times

Don't worry, Electron apps are working hard on saving us from 60 Hz.

Two months ago, there was a text editor benchmark on the front page, wherein Atom and VS Code were multiple magnitudes behind all the other editors, leading to this conversation:

Commenter: "Can anyone speak to the difference the underlying hardware makes with Atom or Code? Presumably a top-end desktop processor (~4GHz) and latest-generation NVME storage would offer really good performance, but perhaps not."

Me: "A year ago, people made fun about how programs will get proportionally slower once all the developers have switched to SSDs. Now we're already talking about having to upgrade to NVMe disks for a decent code editing experience."

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13935235

I'm not sure if this was from the same thread. Someone was arguing that people who say Electron apps (that is, process intensive apps) shouldn't exist are the same ones trying to stifle innovation. I wound up not replying, but that belief is a crock of shit. It's not that Electron apps shouldn't exist. It's that Electron apps can be a huge trade-off between idea => product ship date and resource use for an end user.

I understand that abstraction comes with a cost. You tend to lose a little bit of control of exactly what your code does, and there will likely be more cycles used (sometimes trivial, other times not so much) to accomplish the same task. It's one thing to push the boundaries of existing hardware for the sake of productivity. It's another to say, "Yeah using Electron apps for text editing is fine. Just make sure you can bankroll bleeding edge computer builds, and you won't see any performance degradation."

How does that seem like a sane line of reasoning to anyone?

Electron apps strike me as the 201x's Visual Basic application. It's more polished looking, prettier, and uses a (debatable) better language. But it's mistaking a prototyping system for something meant for releases. It's easy for people to get it up and running and do lots of neat things. Fine, now you've got that out of the way, get the underlying code to be fast and memory efficient and you have a deliverable application. Don't do that, you're just shipping a prototype.

I see something similar in the hobby hardware space. Everyone using microcontrollers (and some really powerful ones) for tasks like homemade smart lights. It's way overkill, but it gets the job done and done quickly. And as a hobbyist it's great because it's infinitely reusable. But that doesn't make it the right thing to use for a shipping product.

Brings to mind Cstross' story about how he ended up writing scifi. At one point it involves pressing a massive proof of concept perl script for a UK online payment service into production, and keeping it afloat as companies and banks piled on.

For many applications, it isn't financially viable to ever make them fast and memory efficient because compute time is just far, far cheaper than programmer time. Electron is perfect for that type of application.

Is that really true? I mean, is it cheaper to write programs using javascript and Electron than a native GUI? It's cheaper to port, I'll grant you, compared to something written to target a native GUI. But, hell, even java and flash had a better memory and CPU story than Electron.

EDIT: Ok, to expand on this. Running a small number (< 5) of Electron-based applications on my MBP with 16GB of memory feels like running the same number of instances of Eclipse circa 2005 on my shitty, cheap HP laptop. Nothing else can run alongside them because they're so memory/CPU hungry. But here's the thing, computers have gotten better since 2005. What's the rationale for such poor performance with these apps? my computer has 8x the memory today (maybe more) than that one had. The clock is up by 2-3x. Cores increased by 4x.

There's no excuse for this in final, deliverable products.

> There's no excuse for this in final, deliverable products.

There is an excuse for it if you aren't willing to pay for faster software. Cheap is more important than fast for most software products.

They wont be good enough for light-field-based mixed-reality computing just like command line computers weren't good enough for GUIs.

How many more computers will we probably buy before mixed-reality jumps the chasm and goes mainstream? I don't think it's more than 2.

I think you're right, but at the current rate of progress it's going to take a while to get there.

We're currently in the modern equivalent of the mid-90s DOS plateau, where an experience that's actually quite mediocre has become the default user expectation.

Getting past this requires an order of magnitude increase in processor power. Given what's happening in hardware that seems unlikely any time soon.

It's more likely tablets will gradually catch up and merge with desktops - but there won't be any dramatic change in the UX offered by either. That needs speed and UI technologies that are at least a generation away.

The new UX will come from voice, AI, and robotics, which will make computing more physically interactive, and less tied to the glass typewriter/document library model.

I largely agree, although I think mixed-reality will be the new UX, with voice & AI being a big part of it as well. But we may need 2 orders of magnitude in GPU/Watt performance before light-field glasses replace 2D screens.

Given the gargantuan data/compression requirements of light-fields (Lytro's cameras capture >300GB/sec of lightfield data!!!), plus rendering, persistent SLAM, etc, we'll need the power of a GTX1080Ti or better, but able to run flat out using only 1-3Watts of power instead of ~250W.

The good news is this is what the global smartphone manufacturing ecosystem is working towards, with a relatively short device life-cycle to finance the huge effort that will be required to get there. But mid to late 2020s will be all about mixed reality. I am convinced that it will be so incredibly compelling, that any 2D screen, no matter the size, resolution, dynamic range, or refresh rate, will be like command line compared to GUI today.

And yet what do we see time and time again, tiling UIs used to multiplex CLIs.

When we really want to get things done with a computer, we keep coming back to the keyboard and the CLI.

Even high end math/design/engineering packages have a CLI in them.

I think that is because, at their core, computers parse language (be it computer or human). At some point you need to input that language, which is a task keyboards and command-lines excel at. It's the lowest common denominator, so it will always exist.

At the same time, there are ways that you can program a computer that do not rely on pure text input. We've already seen things like Scratch, GameMaker, and Unreal Engine's blueprint system explode in popularity. When the tools are built, people will use them, and they can supplant the previous paradigm.

I think there are advantages VR/MR can have for simple text input, too. I would love to have a virtual work environment where my files live in "physical" locations, where I can visit them as if they were sheets of paper or trinkets, arranging files or bits of code in front of me into graphs I can walk around and draw on like a whiteboard.

It is a matter of business. Computers could be built to last 30 years and more. Ex: Control system in nuclear reactors and satellites. But modern electronics are engineered to last a limited time. This is due to 2 reasons. It helps companies sell stuff perpetually thus staying in business. But also because it keeps costs down and gets consumer cheap products. It is due to this engineering to such narrow tolerances that we can buy a laptop for a $1000 instead of $10000.

Imagine if computers cost $10000 and I got a core2duo machine years ago. I would be very reluctant to get it originally because of the cost and because I know there would be faster systems on the market in a few years. Engineering devices to have a limited lifetime has supported innovation by helping companies make money and by making things affordable so that normal people can buy the latest gadgets.

I know this has been bad for the environment and for those of us who would like things to last forever (I'm one). But, we can't discount the fact that a lot of tech innovation today is due to this very reason.

> I got a core2duo machine years ago

Now that the Moore's curve has started to flatten, I would not be nearly as opposed to a 30 year machine (especially a repairable one) today as I would have been even 5 years ago.

New processors and RAM are not making the previous generation processors obsolete anymore, which leads me to believe that a 30 year computer is now something which could be realistically considered.

There are definitely some consumer PC's today that will last 10+ years. Every time a new CPU line comes out the benchmarks aren't vastly different from Intel 2500K/2600K. It seems like Ryzen will be a similar "BIFL" processor.

I've been using 5+ year old kit at home for a long time. In fact my main PC is about 10 years old right now.

I buy from the local college surplus when they life-cycle their desktops. For what I do at home (browsing, email, youtube, ssh for work) they are more than adequate.

I do as well, but when I built it, I was doing so with the thought that I would have to replace a lot of components every other year. It's a gaming rig that I maxed out - and it's still capable of playing the latest games on maximum settings at 1920x1080. It's not as good at 4k with the latest titles, but that doesn't bother me a lot.

So despite my plan to replace components constantly, I haven't actually had to do it. This has made me realize how little practical value constant upgrades to these components now provides.

Computers could be built to last 30 years and more

I like to play with 8-bit machines, BBC Micro, C=64, Atari 800 and the like, all 30+ years old, the only repair they need is when a capacitor dries out and thats easy to do with the manual and a soldering iron. The constant upgrade cycle of so-called modern machines is clearly, totally artificial.

Lucky I only had an Atari 400...

The hours I spent trying to learn basic with no book and no internet on that thing. Just typing random things into that blue console trying to figure out what secrets it held.

If the upgrade cycle is so artificial, why aren't you doing more than playing with those older machines? I'm willing to bet you didn't post this comment from a Commodore 64, why not? If upgrades are artificial and computer systems last forever, why are you using a newer computer and not still using the BBC Micro? What's stopping you from watching Netflix and playing Call of Duty on your Atari?

You miss my point - 30 years ago we knew how to create machines that would last - have we lost that skill, or has it been deliberately discarded?

Computers DO last 30 years, though. Sometimes the capacitors blow, but that's a fairly easy fix, and is a risk in all electronics.

The main problem is that computers improve much more quickly than musical instruments, or cars, or whatever. I have computers that are nearly 40 years old that work just as well today as the day they were made, the only problem is these old computers don't run the modern apps we want. They don't have music players, or web browsers, or even convenient Internet access.

The computer didn't get worse, the world just moved on. Likewise, your old Core2Duo machine from ten years ago is just as good today, except it was made for an era when Windows fit inside of 256mb of RAM, and javascript was only used to make your cursor a weird color.

Computers don't get slower, we just ask them to do more things.

"I wish I could buy tablets and computers the same way I buy synthesisers and mixers: knowing full well that they'll be just as useful in 20 years, as they are the day I bought them."

I have used my early-2009 octo-core Mac Pro for 8 years now and I am about to do a set of upgrades to it[1] that I believe will make it useful with no caveats or sacrifices for at least another four years.

I can't believe this is the case - I would never have imagined that that 2009 computer purchase would last 12+ years.

Also, I used my original 13" MBA for almost 7 years before the speakers stopped working. 2GB of RAM was getting a little cramped for my style of 20-tabs-open web browsing, but it wasn't unusable ...

Finally, I have, powered on in my office (and used regularly) an SGI Octane2 which is quite a bit older than all of the above and is a wonderful, wonderful computer - one of the best ever made.

[1] Max out the ram, PCIe based bootable SSD, USB3 card.

I think that's an unfair comparison. (Hardware) Synthesisers are pretty much feature complete, once a good one is made there's not much more you can add to it and therefore the evolution of them over the years hasn't changed much. I doubt the midi spec has even updated much since it was created? The only thing with much scope to improve on the audio side is mainly around software (better daws, synths etc)

This is like comparing sound cards to graphics cards. Good quality sound cards will pretty much last forever because we've reached the peak of human hearing and the latency can't get any lower, (I've had the same sound card for production for over 10 years). GPUs however have loads of scope for improvement and so new ones are constantly coming out all the time, making old ones obselete.

Thing is that a synth is a sealed package built to do one thing.

With General Purpose Computers, there is a ongoing Jevon's paradox. As hardware improves, software is changed or introduce that gobble up said improvements and then some.

Thus software outpaces hardware to a massive degree.

We can see this in how as time march forward, what used to be done using dedicated chips are done using a GPC and software that emulates the dedicated chips.

musical instrument manufacturers know that a musical instrument that needs repair/maintenance/upgrades on a regular basis, isn't a musical instrument. (Its more of a toy.)

Well, hang on now! That may be true of electronic instruments, but if you buy a piano and don't have it regularly tuned and maintained, that's how you end up with a honky-tonky toy piano. :)

> knowing full well that they'll be just as useful in 20 years

My Lenovo T61 is almost 10 years old and I still use it daily. I hope it will last another 3-5 years.

Well if you don't expect your iPad or laptop to ever run any software newer than what was around when it came out, it'll certainly last 30 years, barring component failure.

As long as tech keeps marching forwards (whether you agree with the direction or not) things will keep going obselete.

Stagnation is the only thing that will stop it.

How would releasing a refined instrument like you describe work with a device which connects to the internet?

A high quality Moog synthesizer has a barrage of technical capabilities and is engineered and manufactured to the highest standards and tightest tolerances. The same can be said for a Macbook Pro.

The difference between them is that we expect the Macbook Pro to evolve over time. We expect it to connect to an ever-evolving network of other computers, where new threats and opportunities arise every day.

If you take that Macbook Pro and never connect it to the internet, I suspect you'd still have a wonderfully working machine in 10-20 years. If an issue comes up it would almost certainly be the SSD - which, since it's soldered in, can't be replaced.

Take my favorite Macbook though, the 2010 Pro - with its user-replaceable RAM, disk drive, and available optical drive. If I take care of it there's no reason I won't be able to get it to boot in 10-20 years.

Yes, because of course the evil manufacturers could have built 20-30 years ago a pc that could have worked perfectly today if they treated it like a musical instrument. I think that maybe you are missing the multiple orders of magnitude of computational power increase in the last 2-3 decades..

I believe it is because modern capitalism is supposed to work this way. Technology is a mass product and our economic system requires people to work more to buy more products. Ever changing technology is the way this system can survive.

I wonder how realistic a static computer could be given its full of app-stores and internet.

I imagine video game consoles and other forms of electronics, at least up until recently probably were build as you say.

Yeah, bought a Nook (Ereader) in the UK where bookstore was swapped out and then died. So glad I hadn't bought loads of ebooks, because I'd have been fuming.

Well, you can always find a reason to buy a new synthesizer. That works in the favour of the manufacturer.

Computers, not so much.

Source: Also collecting synthesizers. :)

Synthesisers and mixers are less dependent on getting faster/more powerful. They are inherently more long-lived.

There's a pricing tier problem too. MacBook Pros aren't Pro machines anymore, and netbooks/Chromebooks aren't really that cheap.

(This isn't on the same axis as fixability, but capitalism is usually able to deliver many variants and niche products, so fixable, expandable computers should exist at some price point, while Chromebooks/appliances you don't really ~own~ still have a thick piece of the market.

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