In a post by Jeff Atwood over at the excellent Coding Horror, there’s this brilliant chart showing the “hyperbolic performance improvement” of the iPhone since it first debuted in 2008. As Jeff points out, in just five years, the iPhone has seen a factor of 20 performance improvement in Browsermark and a factor of four improvement in GeekBench, at least doubling performance every year.
Atwood’s conclusion is incredibly well-stated: “The PC is over … at least in the form that we knew it. We no longer need giant honking laptop and desktop form factors for computers any more than we need entire rooms and floors of a building to house mainframes and minicomputers.”
I’m still a die-hard MacBook Air defender, but Cult of Mac has writers who file everything from the iPad. Atwood’s right: with the kind of performance we’re now seeing in iPhones and iPads, almost no one actually needs a desktop or even a laptop. The exceptions are the outliers, where as recent as four years ago, they were the status quo.
Source: Coding Horror
