Comment by thewebguyd
4 days ago
It's always struck me as living in some sort of bizaro world. We now have these super powerful personal computers, both handheld (phones) and laptops (My M4 Pro smokes even some desktop class processors) and yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...be a dumb terminal to someone else's computer.
I had always hoped we'd do more locally on-device (and with native apps, not running 100 instances of chromium for various electron apps). But, it's hard to extract rent that way I suppose.
What's truly wild when you think about it, is that the computer on the other end is often less powerful than your personal laptop.
I access websites on a 64gb, 16 core device. I deploy them to a 16gb, 4 core server.
Yes, but your computer relies on dozens (hundreds?) of servers at any given time.
I don't even understand why computer and phone manufacturers even try to make their devices faster anymore, since for most computing tasks, the bottleneck is all the data that needs to be transferred to and from the modern version of the mainframe.
There are often activities that do require compute though. My last phone upgrade was so Pokemon Go would work again, my friend upgrades for the latest 4k video or similar.
Consumers care about battery life.
Yet manufacturers give us thinner and thinner phones every year (instead of using that space for the battery), and make it difficult to swap out batteries which have degraded.
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Also when a remote service struggle I can switch to do something else. When a local software struggles it brings my whole device to its knees and I can't do anything.
And providers count their capacity in Giga-watts.
I think people have been finding more compelling use cases for the fact that information systems can be multi-player now than for marginal FLOPS. Client-server is just a very effective way of organizing multi-player information systems.
yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...animate liquid glass