It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software in the current environment." I assume this is what's happening - people are trying to get their products in customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's less about developers and more about business needs.
Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).
There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model.
I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
What are the upsides? You only listed a few things that you like, but not why they should take over all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are already widely available now without the need to hollow out the custom PC market.
There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start manufacturing components more easily and provide more competition. If you turn PCs into prepackaged proprietary monoliths, expect even fewer players on the market than we have now, in addition to a complete lack of repairability and upgradability. When you can't pick and choose the parts, you let the manufacturer dictate what you're allowed to buy in what bundles, what spare parts they may sell to you (if any) and what prices you will pay for any of these things. Even if you're not building custom PCs yourself, the availability of all these individual components is putting an intrinsic check on what all-in-one manufacturers can reasonably charge you.
The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.
That I agree with. I'm just also making the point that the silver lining had always existed, since similar fully-integrated products go back decades. The end seems inevitable to me now, and there's no good to be found there. We already had everything. Now is when that starts to be taken away.
I'm thinking of this like car radios. Most cars used to have this standard called DIN to put the radio in. Most cars today don't have DIN mounts anymore. We've gotten way nicer, bigger touch screens in our infotainment now since cars are not locked into one form factor. On the other hand, it sucks in some ways because vendor lock in. I hope we at least get a tradeoff like that - that there will be something in return for it.
There are systems like the NUC but if I want a super-high-end 5090 and top-end CPU, all of the options to cool them feel like... well, something kluged together from whatever parts I can find, not something that's designed as a total system. Maybe we'll get some interesting designs out of this.
I'm afraid the acceptance (and, more troubling, the seeming desire on the part of technical people who I see as misguided) of mobile computers in the smart phone form factor to be locked down and hostile to their owners has moved the Overton window on personal computers being equally owner-hostile. The bucket-of-parts PC ecosystem is less susceptible to an effort to lock down the platform and create walled gardens. If that market goes away it gets easier to turn all of our personal computers into simply computer-shaped devices (like Chromebooks and iPads).
I'm really fearful that PCs are going down the road of locked bootloaders, running the user-facing OSs inside bare-metal hypervisors that "protect" the hardware from the owner, etc.
I'll accept that I'm likely under the influence of a bit of paranoia, too.
I'm strongly of the opinion several unaffiliated factions (oligarchs, cultural authoritarians, "intellectual property" maximalists, software-as-a-service providers, and intelligence agencies, to name a few) see unregulated general purpose computers in the hands of the public as dangerous.
I don't think there's an overt conspiracy to remove computing from the hands of the public. The process is happening because of an unrelated confluence of goals.
I don't see anybody even remotely comparable in lobbying power standing up for owner's rights, either.
Unfortunately, data center computers are not something you can just use as a consumer. They usually have custom connectors, and the parts are soldered down into rack-scale computers. They use custom water cooling that needs building-sized pumps, and so on. A Blackwell rack uses 140,000 watts and weighs 3500 lbs. A typical house in the US has 40,000-50,000 watts of power max and can only support 40 lbs per sq foot. These things are never going to be useable by consumers.
If the AI boom slows, it will free up manufacturing capacity for the consumer supply chain, but there is going to be a long drought of supply.
The dead people on that airplane are a pretty strong contradiction too this.
I’d love to see ATC funded by usage fees (some kind of “landing toll”) instead of the government (with some kind of licensing / oversight - like how pilots and pilot licensing works). The current system clearly is not working.
The government is a great tool to regulate but not execute.
If the regulations are crazy let the people who have to implement them strike.
As an EV owner, I'm not sure I agree with this. I'd make less stops if not for the car's need. That said, it's a compromise I'm willing to accept since 99% of the time I'm not road tripping but commuting, and the EV is oh so nice for the commute.
If you want to see the potential value of Claude, pick a somewhat isolated function in your code and tell Claude "write unit tests for this". Watch it write them, compile your code, validate the test, fix the ones it did something dumb on, and iterate. Laugh as you get 10 awesome tests and 2 really dumb ones you have to go in and clean up by hand for 5 minutes of work. Half a day of iterating later you'll have finished the extremely tedious test writing that would have taken you a day or two without Claude.
When doing a code review, tell Claude "review commit xyz". It finds things humans are not finding in reviews at this point.
Not sure about what you want to do for some design? Use Claude as a rubber duck - tell it "I'm deciding between implementing this with A or B and here's why... is there any thing I'm missing that would make the decision more clear, or any potential solution I've missed?" It has the context of your existing code, which can be incredibly helpful for stuff like this.
Opus 4.6 is good enough that it's undeniable that it's going to change the industry at this point. It's just a question of how big the change will be. The earlier models were shit. Everyone I worked with spurned them, including me. Everyone around me using Opus 4.6 is saying "well, shit, this is real now" with varying degrees of excitement and unease.
AI is not some magic pill. A lot of software development is not writing code, it's requirements gathering and design. That part doesn't magically go away, in fact it becomes way more important. But AI is speeding up the writing code part of things - if, and only if, you put down a good plan first.
People will structure their code where AI can churn on it (specs in markdown, and TDD all over again), it's useful enough to be worth it. We're going to get segmented into engineers who can use it and engineers who can't.
For this technology I'd not wait. Start learning it.
We're all going to be more focused on being architects instead of developers.
fwiw this is how it's always been. You don't have to be some kind of extreme extrovert, but people who are good at what they do tend to enjoy working with other people who are good at what they do, and when they see someone they recognize as "I'd work with this guy again" they put in the minimal effort to stay in contact - a hello text every few months, a cup of coffee every few years, that type of thing. Thats all it takes. If you're not doing that, yeah, you're in for a world of hurt when you go job hunting.
Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).
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