Hardware Freeze.

M

mindbend

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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.
 
The only problem with your idea is that 100% of the computer developers have to agree with it in order for it to work.

If Apple stops developing hardware, and Gateway continues to; then Gateway can market themselves as having a better product.

Consider the average computer buyer. They look at Memory, Hard Drive space, RAM and possibly the processor(s) when purchasing a unit. They expect better machines to have more of each. Even though this is not always the case.

Add to the fact that Apple has to do everything it can to encourage software companies to develop for their platform. If code is sloppy, we depend on the hardware to pick up the slack and run fast anyway. True we shouldn't promote crappy code, and your point about Halo I couldn't agree more with you on that, but we do have to let hardware carry the brunt of the load... And thus it must continually be looked at and improved upon.

I agree, however, Apple's focus has to be on software as apposed to hardware. But if you look at their product deployment, you can see that Apple has been doing that. We have been on the G4 chip for several years now, the Pentium has gone through three sets since the g4's introduction. The G4 towers just got re-designed this year, but the design is more of an upgrade.

Finishing up:
Software has gotten fat, a great timeline I've always liked to to use is the Search function in the Apple OS. It started as a very simple search which could be launched with command+F. Then feature upon feature was added to the utility, until finally (in Sherlock) it crossed the line. It went from being a search utility where you could find something on your machine to a utility designed to find things on the web... Suddenly hitting command+F in the finder took an additional second before you could begin typing. The GUI got to be too much for some machines to handle. In Jaguar, my grip was addressed, and now we have a utility that actually seems to be focused on finding something locally, which is what the average user used it for anyway.

In order to thin out the software it needs to be developed for older machines. And to further diminish the speed bumps, hardware should be developing for software that is 2x fatter then it actually is.
 
Yeah, the market structure of the economy will defeat your idea in the end. Luckly programming for apple computers has been less sloppy than the software for windows due to the mac os not compensating as heavily for programmer error like windows does. Slowly software optimization will be valued more as they run into natural hardware limitations though. Anyhow...shouldn't babble too much...too broad of a topic.
 
I like it - it would give software developers a chance to catch up - force them to learn the art of writing more elegant code.
 
If all things were equal, it would be a great thing for software developers. At the company I work at we are going through a lock-down for the holidays. No site-wide changes allowed for programmers, and designers can only modify the welcome page merchandise. But we keep very busy during the holidays, looking at ways to improve the site, and fixing little bugs... it's during this time that I'll get the chance to test the site out. (which is really a point in mindbend's favor).

But once again, it all comes down to what everybody else is doing.

Of course, Apple is pretty good about applications working on multiple machines and OSs. It wasn't until OSX that applications weren't backwards compatable. So under that consideration, software developers really have had a lot of time to streamline code. I think keeping everything open source has its advantages in software development.

I code (in HTML) and even in that, I still can go back to my code and find different several improvements.
 
Originally posted by evildan
It wasn't until OSX that applications weren't backwards compatable.
Click to expand...

Ah, youth. He must not have been around for the introduction of the PowerPC in 95 or so. Then we had "fat" versions of software to run on the 68XXX and the new PowerPC. Still, I'm not complaining - OS X is a great thing and I am 99.9% classic free.
 
there was an interesting article somewhere about how adding more x86 instruction sets would speed up computing moreso than just piling on the processor speeds. I'll try to find this article =/
 
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