I have been proposing a hardware freeze for years now. Not that anyone is listening or that it's even remotely realistic, but here's my arguments:
1. Historically, hardware has accelerated faster than software, creating a speed gap. Software developers can't code fast enough and cleanly enough to provide the best possible (read:fastest) apps/OS.
2. Bloated RAM and hard drive space just allows coders to be sloppy and inefficient. Remembers when an entire OS and some apps could be loaded from a floppy?
3. A few years ago I looked at some Silicon Graphics workstation CPU specs and was surprised to see that they were pathetic. Like 200 MHz or something. The reason they were so fast is because of highly optimized code and highly integrated solutions.
4. If you haven't seen the latest Halo 2 trailer for Xbox, take a look. You will poop yourself. That game is [will be] better looking than anything else available and it's going to run on two year old hardware or the equivalent of, what like a single proc 800 Piii with a GeForce 3 or something like that? The reason, once again, why it is so stunning is because, as Bungie themselves put it, they completely recoded the engine specifically from the ground up to run just on the Xbox.
5. We are running on decades of legacy OS code. Even with X's facelift, it's still a Unix core, blah blah blah. If you could start completely from scratch and develop an OS specifically for ...oh wait, BeOS tried that. Nevermind. Was a good idea though.
My point: The pace of hardware is actually working against us in the end. If Apple knew that they were never going to get past 1.25 MHz forever and ever, I guarantee you we'd start seeing some really efficient apps (over a few years) that would continue to be streamlined to the point of astonishing performance. Right now, because, for Apple, hardware precedes software, the incentive is to have the software slightly slow so you feel the need to upgrade your box. Not that Apple wants it slow necessarily, but the incentive is not there like it would be otherwise.
1. Historically, hardware has accelerated faster than software, creating a speed gap. Software developers can't code fast enough and cleanly enough to provide the best possible (read:fastest) apps/OS.
2. Bloated RAM and hard drive space just allows coders to be sloppy and inefficient. Remembers when an entire OS and some apps could be loaded from a floppy?
3. A few years ago I looked at some Silicon Graphics workstation CPU specs and was surprised to see that they were pathetic. Like 200 MHz or something. The reason they were so fast is because of highly optimized code and highly integrated solutions.
4. If you haven't seen the latest Halo 2 trailer for Xbox, take a look. You will poop yourself. That game is [will be] better looking than anything else available and it's going to run on two year old hardware or the equivalent of, what like a single proc 800 Piii with a GeForce 3 or something like that? The reason, once again, why it is so stunning is because, as Bungie themselves put it, they completely recoded the engine specifically from the ground up to run just on the Xbox.
5. We are running on decades of legacy OS code. Even with X's facelift, it's still a Unix core, blah blah blah. If you could start completely from scratch and develop an OS specifically for ...oh wait, BeOS tried that. Nevermind. Was a good idea though.
My point: The pace of hardware is actually working against us in the end. If Apple knew that they were never going to get past 1.25 MHz forever and ever, I guarantee you we'd start seeing some really efficient apps (over a few years) that would continue to be streamlined to the point of astonishing performance. Right now, because, for Apple, hardware precedes software, the incentive is to have the software slightly slow so you feel the need to upgrade your box. Not that Apple wants it slow necessarily, but the incentive is not there like it would be otherwise.