As a software engineer this feels like heresy, but I can't wait for the day computers stop getting faster. Shoddy software design has been bailed out time and time again by Moore's law. I'm excited by the prospect of a software industry where "tell the client to buy a faster computer" is no longer an acceptable excuse.
For example, there's room for a clean, native cross-platform application toolkit that does everything that electron does. But we don't have that. Instead application developers use electron (trading my CPU & RAM for their time). And people get angry at Apple for "only" shipping 16 gigabytes of RAM in their computers rather than angry at lazy app developers. And we don't invest in the tooling we'd need to actually fix the problem. (In this case, Electron but small and native).
Another example - as an industry we know how to make fast compilers (eg Go, Jai, V8, LuaJIT, etc). But instead most new languages (rust, pony, zig, etc) are built on top of LLVM. LLVM used to be super fast - but now even in debug mode its sluggish.
There's usually nothing wrong with old computers & phones, but we throw them out anyway because software developers buy faster computers then take shortcuts.
Bloated software creates demand in hardware. And demand drives supply. When CPU speeds stopped increasing they started adding more cores and created SMT. As Moore's Law is ending they start adding specialized coprocessors (M1). Circling back to the 80s.
All these fancy new hardware technologies are not aimed at particle physics, HFT, or fringe high performance shops. They are aimed at consumer grade shitty software and a whole industry who is driven by deadlines and non-technical managers.
The change in the software industry has to come from within.
For example, there's room for a clean, native cross-platform application toolkit that does everything that electron does. But we don't have that. Instead application developers use electron (trading my CPU & RAM for their time). And people get angry at Apple for "only" shipping 16 gigabytes of RAM in their computers rather than angry at lazy app developers. And we don't invest in the tooling we'd need to actually fix the problem. (In this case, Electron but small and native).
Another example - as an industry we know how to make fast compilers (eg Go, Jai, V8, LuaJIT, etc). But instead most new languages (rust, pony, zig, etc) are built on top of LLVM. LLVM used to be super fast - but now even in debug mode its sluggish.
There's usually nothing wrong with old computers & phones, but we throw them out anyway because software developers buy faster computers then take shortcuts.