r/AskTechnology • u/Educational_Heart429 • 1d ago

Have we reached the Phone and PC hardware endgame?

Have we reached a point where smartphone hardware is basically good enough for almost everyone?

Most people mainly use their phones for messaging, social media, YouTube, photos, and browsing. Even phones from a few years ago can handle all of that easily.

Every ear manufacturers release better phones with faster chips, better cameras, more battery life and so on but how much of a difference do these upgrades actually make in everyday life?

Even in PC gaming, I feel like modern CPUs and GPUs have reached a point where hardware shouldnt be the main limitation anymore

Instead of constantly pushing for more powerful hardware, shouldnt we focus more on software optimization?

Games like the original RollerCoaster Tycoon, famously programmed largely in assembly by Chris Sawyer or the original Doom show just how much can be achieved with efficient programming.

Nowadays in gaming it sometimes feels like developers rely too heavily on technologies like DLSS and FSR instead of properly optimizing their games and i wonder how many demanding modern games could run on mid-range hardware with better optimization.

Especially with AI potentially making software development and optimization easier I believe the next big leap in technology should come from better software rather than better hardware.

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u/EmeraldHawk 1d ago

Yes, old hardware is fine for almost everyone.

But, have you actually tried to get Claude code to make software more efficient? It mostly spits out code that is more verbose and less efficient than what I write myself. For example, it loves to add regular expressions (which can be quite slow) when simpler substring matching would suffice.

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u/AcidlyVerdant 1d ago

The regex thing drives me nuts. It'll reach for some convoluted pattern when three lines of basic string checks would do the job twice as fast and be readable. AI coding tools right now feel like they optimize for "looks clever" rather than actually being efficient.

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u/werpu 1d ago

claude is just as good as his supervisor, you gan guide it and steer it and give it rules but you need to check commits and the code regularily if you want to keep it well organized

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u/stop_deleting_plz 1d ago edited 1d ago

We have reached the endgame for silicon computing in general. Node size cannot go below 2nm, because at the wavelength of an electron, transistors cannot function correctly. That's why we are doing FINFET and "3D" chips, because stacking is the only way to cram more transistors in.

Moore's law has been dead for 10+ years at this point. We are going to need a big paradigm shift to get faster.

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u/cTreK-421 1d ago

Really the only major upgrade phones can have is increased camera sensor size and improved lenses, and improved battery (better chips can help with, see iPhone) which would mean thicker slightly heavier phones

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u/SecretDirector1964 1d ago

For phones, mostly yes. My upgrades now happen because the battery is dying or updates stop, not because the old one got slow. The camera is the only thing I still notice improving year to year. PCs feel the same unless you game or edit video

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u/Alia5_ 1d ago

shouldnt we focus more on software optimization?

developers rely too heavily on technologies like DLSS and FSR instead of properly optimizing

DLSS and FSR are the optimizations ;)

/s