Sunday, November 20, 2005

Are we still here?

Is it just me, or has mainstream adoption of tech been really slow for the past year?

I'm not suggesting that tech development's been slow (though even that does seem to have slowed down slightly), since this year we've seen the launch of dual-cored processors, nVidia's 7800 graphics card, and Intel's new Viiv line of processors, among others.

But just a little earlier, as I was walking home from dinner, I thought to myself, "Hmmm...if I were to get a new desktop today, what specs would I get?" I'm the kind of guy who likes to stay in the know, but happily settles for the mainstream specs (no money), and as I was thinking this to myself, it suddenly hit me.

When I bought my desktop three and a half years ago, I settled for an AthlonXP 1700+, with a GeForce MX400 graphics card backed by 256MB of RAM. Pretty standard in those days.

December last year, I asked the same question and came up with: Athlon64 3200+, 6600GT graphics card and 1GB of RAM. That's quite a leap from the old system, and to be expected seeing as two and a half years had passed.

Today, as I was thinking that to myself, I realised that if I simply followed mainstream adoption, I'd probably get an Athlon64 3500+, a 6800GT card and 1GB of RAM.

That's barely one rung up the ladder from one year ago. Has mainstream adoption slowed down, or is it just me?

3 comments:

Emma said...

I like Mac. *giggles*

SnowDemonDave said...

I guess it's a good sign that they're actually taking the time and putting an effort into building better machines as opposed to racing with competitors. Remember the good ol days when AMD and Intel try to outshine each other by a puny 0.2 GHz every 2 months? Christ.

Scott said...

Dave:
True, but only applicable for the dev front. Like I said, we haven't exactly had a shortage of new developments this year; it's the slowing down of adoption that I'm wondering about.