Commoditizing Our Future

Charlie Stross on Asus’s Eee PC, a sub-notebook that’s selling for about $400:

Moore’s Law suggests that every component of a PC halves in price on a roughly 18-month cycle. A desktop PC today should be roughly 100 times as powerful as a desktop PC of similar price 10 years ago, and 50 times as powerful as a PC of eight and a half years hence. A naive soul with no prior experience of consumer capitalism might ask why, instead of doubling in power, the manufacturers don’t concentrate on cutting prices? But that’s not how the industry worked. Until now.

★ Thursday, 29 November 2007