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10 years has put the power of a desktop into your hand. What will the next decade bring?
What’s the difference between the high-end iMac desktop computer of 2000 and the iPhone 4G of 2010? A few pixels, £1000, and a lot of weight. Photographer Brett Jordan’s “10 Years” infographic masterfully illustrates the power of Moore’s Law and exponential growth by comparing these popular Apple products (see full scale photo below). While the prices have to be adjusted a little depending on where you live (in the US it’s about $1200 for the iMac G3, and $599 for the iPhone 4) the overall truth is universal. The computing power in our hands is growing at an astounding rate that we may not realize on a day to day basis. This same growth, albeit in an earlier stage, is occurring in solar power, DNA sequencing, and other technologies. Trends like these are what make many of us believe that humanity is moving towards a developmental Singularity in the years ahead. No matter what your vision of the future, however, you can’t deny the past ten years of astounding growth in computing. Jordan’s work gives us a view of a decade of change shown side by side. It’s more than a little awe-inspiring.
[image credit: Brett Jordan via Flickr]
Pretty impressive, but the display size on the iPhone is incorrect.
640- width
960- Height
and there is no such product as the iPhone 4G, it’s called the iPhone 4. Can we please get that right?
Same growth is occuring in Solar power, I don’t think so.
Why do people make crazy claims about solar power. I really do not understand it.
Do you have any data that shows that use of solar power is NOT on an exponential curve, because I have data that it is.
I disagree.
the iMac never had 30Gb, and it was less than 500mhz. easy to fact check this on the Mactracker app.
Specs unfortunately lie.
In 2000 I could run all kinds of powerful software on an iMac for which there is nothing even close on iPhone. Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Maya come to mind. Sure there are a few toy apps in similar categories on iPhone but generally they are less than 1/100th the power or feature set of the equivalent desktop apps.
the cause of this doesn’t seem to be the lack of processing power but just software bloat…
While my laptop was being repaired this year, I used an old pII-300 instead, just for fun: win98, office97, everything authentic made-in-2000 (except for the browser, FF2, the modern web was just too much for IE5 & Netscape 4…)
And it felt much faster than my workplace core2quad with Vista. (except for web browsing, which was awfully slow.)
So I think that iPhone could run much more complicated things but no one wants to optimize that much anymore…
I feel like I’m missing something “…masterfully illustrates the power of Moore’s Law…”
Masterfully? There’s a picture of both products with their specs spelled out. No offense to the artist or the author of the article but I gotta call a spade a spade…
Moore’s law should have it’s counterpart ..Called Murcia’s law , where it is said that every 2 year a developer graduates from the same courses he needs twice the resources to make the same thing as his predecessors.
I think that the iPhone4 includes a decent digital still and video camera should be noted in this pissing match
“Masterfully” my ass. It should list the processing power of the two products (floating point calculations, etc) instead of the simple stats. It’s not like I couldn’t upgrade the iMac to a higher capacity hard drive and RAM.
Also, Brett Jordan, Photographer where? Those just look like pics from Apple’s site. I could reproduce this in five minutes in any page layout program.