No, not the maturity of people. Nor pets. I’m talking about an industry, one I’ve followed all of my adult life: personal computing.
Yes, personal computing is mature. This doesn’t mean that there’s no further progress to be made in advancing the technology. What it means is that for the majority of people, damn near any modern computer will meet their needs, from the standpoint of both hardware and software. This fact scares the living hell out of the major industry players.
This is not some sort of sudden industry earthquake. It’s a slow, gradual process that draws in more and more people as the state of the art improves and becomes everything they need. I have a friend who still uses Office 97, and another who still uses Office 2000. I myself stuck with Office 2000 until 2010 or so. Why? It did everything I needed. I bought Office 2007 for its ability to add comments to documents, and later looked at Office 2013, but I see nothing there that I need and don’t have. I paid a box shop to build me a Win 7 quadcore tower in 2011 that was my primary desktop machine until it started getting flaky in 2023. I bought a name-brand 8-core mini-tower running Win10, and scrapped the quadcore. As I’ve mentioned here on Contra, I recently bought a 10-core Win11 Dell machine when updates for Win 10 were scheduled to end.
It’s unclear whether Microsoft made Windows 11 incompatible with older hardware to force hardware upgrades; after all, Microsoft does not sell computers. They can force existing Windows users to upgrade the OS by dropping security fixes for the older release. And they can sell current Windows installs to the makers of ready-to-run computers, by fiat. So to some extent, Windows can force upgrades.
This is less true of application software providers. I learned page layout on Adobe InDesign 1.0, way back in the ‘90s. I bought each upgrade through Creative Suite 2, and I’m still running CS2. Newer versions will export ebook layouts, but I’ve already got Jutoh, a dedicated ebook layout package, which does everything newer InDesign versions do regarding ebooks, and more.
I’ll buy software upgrades when they provide something new or better than what I already have. What I won’t buy is software as a service (SAAS) which is basically a magazine subscription for your software. You can keep using it only as long as you keep paying for it, forever. Microsoft and Adobe have SAAS applications. No sale. There are MS Office lookalikes, and if Adobe does something stupid and remotely disables my copy of CS2, there is Affinity, now owned by Canva and currently available for…free. Affinity is offered by Canva as a front end for Canva, and can also do graphics design and photo editing, making it a peer of Adobe’s Creative Suite. Sure, Adobe offers more apps in its suite. But…do you really need all that other stuff?
Then there’s the issue of software upgrades that mostly sell other stuff. A lot of people are starting to wonder if the primary purpose of Windows 11 is to sell people on cloud-based storage and other online things, which are SAAS and (as far as I’m concerned) an immense privacy risk.
Game software (at least the puzzle games that I use) approximate SAAS by forcing you to watch an ad before each game, or at some game juncture. The Wordscapes crossword game offers ad-free play for a price, and for a set period of time. When that runs out, the ads begin again, until you fork over more cash. After playing it and enjoying it despite its ads, I paid for Nut Sort, a color-key variation on the Towers of Hanoi game, and no longer have to watch ads before each new game. However, if you want to tweak the game by adding another bolt, you must watch an ad before you get the bolt.
Both games have what I consider a fatal flaw: If for whatever reason the games’ providers can’t push down an ad…the game stops. Mercifully, it doesn’t happen often. If it happened more often I’d say the hell with them and uninstall their games. The providers are punishing game players for something the game players have absolutely no control over; that is, no one buying ads the game providers can show to players.
Summing up: In times past, people bought new computers and new software versions fairly often, because the technology was getting better at a furious pace. This is still true to an extent for smartphones and tablets, and the more people use their smartphones, the oftener they’ll buy newer and more feature-rich models. I use mine for phone calls, by and large, along with with weather radar and a small handful of other things used only occasionally. My tablets are mostly ebook readers.
I’m not spending a great deal of money on hardware and software anymore. I’m not alone, and the industry is terrified of us. I’ve not even touched on open-source software like Linux, to which a lot of people are moving in the wake of Win 11. If they weren’t afraid of it in the 1990s, they are damned well afraid of it now. Will that fear change their business models? Probably not.
Let’s watch.
Heh… the last computer I bought was a “workstation” laptop in 2013 – it worked fine up until last year, when I tried to get Win11 on it – no go, even though it has an i7 and TPM, some quirk prevents every possible option, past the initial install – updates happen, then it bluescreens… So – for the last couple of years, I have been using a “hand-me-down” laptop that, uh … “gets the job done”, but I hate it’s keyboard, screen and general slowness.
So – uh, black friday sales started last week – so I finally ordered a new “monster” luggable… i9 (something like 32-threads), 96gb RAM, AI-capable graphics card (might want to play around with some local models), 8tb of SSD NVMe storage (RAID0 for speed)… It sounded wonderful, until yesterday when they changed the delivery-date to 12/31, instead of 12/12… sigh…
It was either that, or continue to go down the path of a custom PC desktop build (I have about 1/3rd of the parts, but was getting into “analysis paralysis” regarding the closed-loop liquid CPU cooling, etc.) – will likely give those parts to one of my kids and help them complete a build.
But yes – generally seeing maturity in all-things PC-related.
DIY desktop PCs are increasingly difficult to justify because of cost & hassle. For years now, graphic cards have been overpriced and now DDR5 memory prices have spiked (dramatically). The semiconductor supply market is unpredictable and is only made worse by AI. My main PC activities are web-browsing and programming, and thankfully, the apps I use for those tasks are FOSS and still run well on my current PC; when the apps start to run too slowly or can no longer be updated, it will be time for a new PC. I still do some gaming, but the games are typically 10+ years old and have modest hardware requirements.
I have been running Linux for quite a while now, and like you mention, there has been a noted increase in people moving over after Microsoft bonkered their upgrade to Windows 11. I think a part of it is that people are tired of the upgrade train, it isn’t necessary, and are feeling taken advantage of. Not mentioned though is that there are a growing number of games that are compatible with Linux thanks to Valve and Steam.
Regarding office software, I’ve been bouncing between Libre Office and Google Docs, and quite honestly, I am always amazed at how well Google Docs works considering it is javascript inside the browser. The ability to share items with others and not have to worry about backups is a bonus.
Question, has anyone here been following Framework? Their claim to fame is repairable and/or customizable laptops.
Enjoy reading your posts, thank you!
Given my lifelong habit of being a tinkerer, I think Framework is a brilliant idea–but I’m not sure there are enough laptop tinkerers in the world to keep them afloat. I’ve owned several laptops but don’t use a laptop anywhere near as often as I used to. None of the old ones broke; I sold or gave them to friends/relatives when I found one that was thinner and/or more powerful. My current Lenovo Yoga is 9 years old and does what I need, with the single exception of not running Win 11. I may research the Framework models to see what’s thin and comes with Win 11. But that’s not something I’m fussing with currently.
I came *this* close to ordering a framework laptop – but, I really wanted the i9 and better GPU…
As per things in the browser – one of the absolute “game-changers” over the last “n-years” has been WebAssembly – and, given many vendors “desktop” applications are actually web-based, but hosted within the “Electron” offering, performance is pretty-good. And some vendors (*cough* Microsoft) basically plan on delivering everything as web-based… “new” Outlook, Teams, etc.
My last couple of desktop builds have been based around “generation minus-one” equipment. They’ve proven completely sufficient for anything I’ve wanted to do and the cost vs. bleeding-edge-latest has been enough to let me swing added RAM etc.
On the subject of maturity of the industry:
A player at my on-line poker site uses the handle “CPU=Z80”.
I thought: Does anyone under 40 even know what a Z80 was?
But it turns out that Z80s were used in embedded systems well into this century. In fact, Zilog continued production of the Z80 until 2024 – 48 years after it was introduced.
Bear in mind that the Z80 appeared only 32 years after COLOSSUS.
That’s maturity.
Here’s a comparison: the Browning .50 caliber machine gun (US designation M2, so “Ma Deuce”) is in service in Ukraine, shooting down Russian drones. And it’s still in production, over 100 years after it was first manufactured.
I never had a Z80 CPU in any of my home PCs, but the furnace systems that we used at work, had Z80’s. Federico Faggin, who was the key designer behind the Intel 8080 and Z80, is an amazing engineer & inventor.
My main desktop is a Ryzen 7 3800X system I assembled in 2019. Works great, though I do have some curses to offer MS regarding their attitude to Windows 10. But that’s okay, it also dual boots Linux Mint, and that runs faster. Windows 10 is giving me headaches on upload performance, managing to use only 8-10Mb/S of the 700Mb/S available in my office on WiFi. Linux has no such problem.
And Linux, of course, is mature. 30+ years and counting, with its roots deep in Unix, which was released just over 54 years ago.
It is a bit disturbing, though, that the OS architecture seems to have evolved so slowly. I used to dislike that the windowing was not embedded in the OS on Linux, but these days, it seems to work just fine.
And 64GB on my desktop, and several TB of disk. I still have some keepsakes. My TP 1.0 (Z80) manual from 1983, and a 500MB half height 3.5″ drive from about 1992 for which I spent way too much.
But Moore’s Law hit a wall. Physics will not be fooled. Thermal stress can destroy anything. So these days my apps are more ambitious, and thread pools are the order of the day. There are many things which can be done in parallel, though there are those which cannot.
And now AI, which I am using every day in coding. I specify, it codes, and I point out its errors. But it is great to be able to declare my intentions, not quite remembering the algorithms available, or being ignorant of them, and the AI will spare me the tedious search on Google, and simply cough up two or three choices and explain the relative advantages. But I lead.
Vibe coding? I keep seeing the result of that madness in apps and websites which parade their clumsy logic. Sorry, but maturity in design experience trumps encyclopedic information.