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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's desktop-class! If your desktop was built in 2005....

Or the early 1990s if you were unfortunate enough to have an Indigo. Mid-1990s if you were really unfortunate and had an Indy, or were fortunate enough to have an Indigo2 with decent gfx.

About the same amount of RAM then, too. :-)

Or if you just bought a mid range chip from 08 - 10. Comparing the 150w behemoths of 2005 to the 5w parts of today is kind of unfair, when we have always had 65 - 110w parts acting as the mainstream.

In that realm, this next generation of 5 - 30w parts from ARM and Intel is performing equivalent to the last generation of core 2 quad processors at 120w. And people did some serious professional work on those kinds of chips.

What was wrong with the desktop in 2005?

Nothing... when running 2005 software. But due to Gates's Law you probably don't want to run 2013 software on 2005 hardware.

Name one software package (not a game), released in 2012-13, that would not work on a midrange 2005 desktop.

"Work" is pretty broad. Let's define it as "have a productive experience" because any non-period matched programs have issues other than pure compatibility. For example, bring many old DOS programs up on modern hardware and they will "work" but be entirely unusable unless you do something to slow them down.

So, 2013 programs that don't "work" on 2005 hardware? Off the top of my head: SolidWorks 2013, VMWARE running Ubuntu 12 on top of Windows, Avid, Visual Studio 2013.

>So, 2013 programs that don't "work" on 2005 hardware? Off the top of my head: SolidWorks 2013, VMWARE running Ubuntu 12 on top of Windows, Avid, Visual Studio 2013.

So basically things 95% of users don't have any need for?

Nothing, it just illustrates the meaningless of the term "desktop-class".

You mean around the same time (give or take 1-2 years) that common people found out that their machines were perfectly good for most of the uses they had in mind, and started feeling the need to constantly upgrade them much less?

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