I got my first MacBook in ‘06, the mid-range white one, when the black one was the max spec’. It was $899 with a .edu, and ~$960 with tax then, I might be off by a little, someone can check OWC.

In the last 2 months, I walked out of my local Target with a neo for just under $750 with Apple care (there was a special) so, cheaper, faster across most metrics a consumer cares about, plus longer battery life, lighter, aluminum over plastic, a USB-C shaped hole that will mostly somewhat work with something you have.

However, if you mean cheap in the sense that if it breaks I’m at the mercy of someone else. Yes. My ‘06 MBB had a data-doubler, and SSD upgrades, and maxed RAM, and I can and did replace and maintain many of its parts myself. Plus, firewire with target disk mode to just clone it onto another machine with SuperDuper that just don’t exist in the same way.

The hardware specs improved, but the software ate all the gains, so really things stayed pretty much the same for years. The primary advantage of faster CPUs, more RAM, and better GPUs in PCs has been to make it less developer-intensive to write software. Where you needed a team of 10 before, now one dev with Electron or Tauri can knock-up a basic business app on their own.

Alternatively we just run the software in a browser (again, the primary advantage being to the developers, not the user) and need hardware to run 'browser + suboptimal app' instead of 'optimized app'.

Essentially modern dev is doing what Visual Basic did in the 1990s, only more so. The impact of that is we buy faster computers to run slower software at a reasonable speed.

The thing is though, this is all a massive win. The supply of software is by far the most important part of tech. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is if the app you need doesn't exist. We shouldn't change it.

We are in a blip. It will end when Big AI crashes and we can all go back to running stuff locally (on cheap VRAM).

Cheaper and faster felt predictable.Now every new chip launch comes with the fine print and hype.

In the old days, the rich didn’t think it was a good idea to burn the atmosphere to produce plausibly deniable child porn.