I don't know if there's a better word out there to describe this phenomenon so I'm gonna call it "technology inflation". Compare this with usual economic inflation:
(Regular) Inflation: Costs for goods and services rise over time. An apartment might be $1000/mo this year and $1030/mo the next year for example.
Technology Inflation: It takes better and better computer hardware to run the same old vanilla programs like word processors, web browsers, even text editors, albeit later versions of these programs.
Case in point:
My first computer when I was a kid in the early 90s was a 286. Though it had 1 megabyte of ram and no Internet, it ran Windows 3.1 fine as well as even a simple driving simulation game.
Fast forward to 2006 when I built a computer from scratch and installed Ubuntu Linux on it which had an app store that updated most of your programs with a click of a button (unlike Windows which you had to search and download updates for most of your programs manually.) Over the years, I noticed that my computer's performance slowed down gradually. I had been blindly installing every single update that was offered, and even when I completely reinstalled the system on the computer like 4 or 5 years later, it was running quite sluggish on the fresh install, unlike back in 2006. Even just running Firefox + the OS took up most of the 2 Gigs of ram I had available, while a decade earlier, Firefox ran fine with just 1 Gig of ram.
Ditto with smartphones and their automatic updates. It seems every subsequent version of most apps becomes more bloated than the previous version. You don't really notice it from version to version but if you keep a phone long enough, you do notice the newer versions of your apps performing slower than the older versions. I had an Android 2.2 smartphone I purchased in 2011 which ran fine back then but when I dusted it out recently and decided to play with it after a factory reset, it ran out of space just trying to update all of the preloaded Google apps that were being forced on it!
People keep talking about Moore's law and how computer power doubles every 18 months. Unfortunately, Moore's law would be moot if hardware requirements for the same old bland software also doubles every 18 months as developers take for granted the increased processing power and make each version of their programs more bloated than the previous one.
So, what's the best way to deal with "technology inflation" going forward? It's true that most software updates are voluntary, app stores seem to do an excellent job at blackmailing you into updating to their latest and more bloated version of their software through showing the shiny bells and whistles and nagging you constantly if you're not using the latest version. Going down this route, your computer or phone will not be able to even run a basic text editor a few years from now due to all the unnecessary bloat. Not installing any updates is also an option but it often ends up being too much trouble than it's worth since it's pretty difficult to search for older versions of software AND convincing your OS that you want to use them instead of the latest.
Ideas?
April 09, 2017 at 02:22PM
