Conor Murphy | Online Editor
There is a certain ease in buying a computer today. Costs have spiraled down, computing power flown up and our power needs have fallen as more and more of our work is online. We have entered an age of technological plenty, where nearly every single computer you can buy is now perfectly fast as most could ever need.
Take notice the next time you are in a computer shop/site. There are basically no bad choices left when dealing with actual computers. Even a lot of the differences mean nothing at all. There is no need for RAM to go over 4GB for the vast majority of people, but they put in more just because it’s gotten incredibly cheap to put in so its an easy number for them to make bigger. It’s just a charade.
This is a great thing for you the consumer. It means that the bottom end of the market is filled out with products that perfectly well serve that 80% of the market, rather than suffering through bad technologies, you get a cheap and literally perfectly functional device.
it releases the technology manufacturers from the spec race and free to experiment
But more interestingly than making it easy for consumers, it releases the technology manufacturers from the spec race and free to experiment. Previously the attempt was always to just get the biggest numbers (RAM, CPU speed etc) into the devices. Now that that isn’t having a real affect anymore the manufacturers are focusing on less necessary and much cooler changes.
For example in America one of the more praised phones of the year is a high price phone with frankly last years specs, Moto X. However it runs perfectly fine because we’ve reached that tipping point and people have praised its set of innovative and futuristic features like always on voice control and situational awareness.
Desperation is the real mother of all invention and computer companies are desperate to give us a reason to spend the big bucks and this has forced them to break molds that have existed in laptops for nearly three decades. The screens spin in bizarre ways that only make sense once you hold them, they’re more focused on battery and the quality of ambient lighting to figure out screen brightness and the cameras are starting to deliver the nice webcam chats we’ve been missing for years.
And again, although this is keeping the higher end at a slightly artificial high as real hardware costs drop it just means the lower down laptops fine tune the age old styles while getting as powerful as anyone could need. This will have an affect of penetrating third world countries with newer technologies at faster speeds than ever before. When the new laptops become nearly as cheap and twice as fast as the old ones there’s no real competition anymore.
So have fun the next time you go laptop shopping, look at the weird and wonderful shapes that now exist and if none of them catch your eye, spend 400 quid and and get a laptop with more battery life, power and functionality than a macbook pro had only two or three years ago.
