Archive for the ‘Hardware’ tag
Retro Tech
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months. Clearly, with ever increasing transistor counts the consumer can expect increasing performance. The performance increases seen up until the early 2000′s allowed software (from games to, more recently, web applications) to increase in complexity as well to take advantage of the boosted performance of new hardware. But in the last few years, most software has reached a point where the increases in hardware performance just don’t affect their day-to-day use. This has given rise to a new category of laptops, dubbed netbooks, which forgo the ultimate in performance for cheap, low power parts.
Netbooks were originally created for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which allowed less fortunate children around the world to gain access to laptops for simple tasks, such as word processing and accessing the internet. Around the time the first netbooks were coming to market, manufacturers and consumers alike seemed to reach an epiphany that ‘hey, there is a significant portion of the laptop market (read: me, in the consumer’s case) that only needs to be able to access the internet and do some word processing.’ Thus, instead of one market for laptops, we now have market segments for gaming laptops and power users, as well as netbooks and lower end laptops that are either much cheaper or much smaller than their desktop replacement counterparts.
A similar trend has been seen in gaming in recent years. With the previous generation of consoles, most games were delivered in the form of disks. Nearly every game was made to take advantage of as much of the processing power as was possible on a given console, take up all of the space available on the disk it was delivered on, and arrive at market for full price. However, with the proliferation of smart phones and digital systems for delivering games, companies small and large have begun reverting back to retro style games that focus more on intuitive, fun gameplay mechanics rather than the most in depth physics or graphics simulations. Now, in addition to the blockbuster games, we see segments for all types of smaller games across the range of platforms.
In both instances, consumers have increased options because someone decided to move laterally rather than forward. Perhaps this is just forward in a different direction.
