And that’s mostly the “bullshit IoT” category. It’s not like the demand for phones and laptops exploded in the last years, it’s IoT, AI and other useless crap - regardless of the process node.

We could start by not requiring new chips every few years.

For 90% of the users, there hasn’t been any actual gain within the last 5-10 years. Older computers work perfectly fine, but artificial slow downs and bad software cause laptops to feel sluggish for most users.

Phones haven’t really advanced either. But apps and OSes are too bloated, hardware impossible to repair, so a new phone it is.

Every device nowadays needs wifi and AI for some reason, so of course a new dishwasher has more computing power than an early Cray, even though nothing of that is ever used.

What exactly do you think these chips are used for?

Because it’s often enough AI, crypto and bullshit IoT.

Admittedly, I only ever entered an operating room under anesthesia, but could you just, you know, put the displays somewhere else?

This seems like one of those informercial “problems”.

You’re oversimplifying things, drastically.

Corporations don’t have one projects, they have dozens, maybe hundreds. And those projects need staffing.

It’s not a chair factory where more people equals faster delivery

And that’s the core of your folly - latency versus throughput. Yes, putting 10 new devs in a project won’t increase speed magically. But 200 developers can get 20 projects done, where 10 devs only finish one.

This is just the peak power. The average power is much less. And batteries can maybe work on a grid scale for smoothing, but not for an individual consumer like a data center.

Outsourcing is realistically often a tool to get mass, not for cost.

There’s a reason so many people went to coding boot camps, there was a huge demand for developers. Here in Germany for quite a while you literally couldn’t get developers, unless you paid outrageous salaries. There were none. So if you needed a lot of devs, you had the chance to either outsource or cancel the project.

I actually talked to a manager about our “near shoreing” and it wasn’t actually that much cheaper if you accounted for all the friction, but you could deliver volume.

BTW: there’s a big difference between hiring the cheapest contractors you can find and opening an office in a low income country. My colleagues from Poland, Estonia and Romania were paid maybe half what I got, but those guys are absolutely solid, no complaints.

I get your point, but have you looked into the power demands of data centers? They already have room filling batteries for power outages, but those are just enough to keep the lights on while the diesel generators start.

None. There is no model that can output anything even remotely usable on that tiny amount of RAM and certainly not using the few CPU cycles your vps has to offer.

Businesses (at least the larger ones) replace their hardware every few years anyway. They don’t care whether their new Optiplexes run Windows 10 or 11 and most hardware bought since 2022 probably has Windows 11 installed already, probably all since 2020 supports it. So there’s hardly a problem here. (Btw I’m taking the management view here, I know that it’s a pain to actually deploy, but that doesn’t matter to management).

The new Intel chips already addressed that, at least for notebook class devices.

Realistically, there wasn’t really a reason for Intel and AMD to be super power efficient, simply because there wasn’t any competition for quite a while. It took Apple Silicon to show how powerful arm can be and how easy the transition could be.

DuckDuckBuntu?

Just like wifi already does?

The US default, that I never left Europe. What an achievement for the USA!

Oh come on, are you really that boneheaded not to understand that you’re not the norm?

I literally had not a single power surge in my entire life. The only power outages I had were for a few minutes maybe three times in the last 15 years.

The larping refers to you. Either you are truly an outlier who actually runs a small DC, or you just like the feeling you can get pretending to do so.

Your attitude is roughly the “only gold plated cables made from solid silver” equivalent in audiophiles. Technically maybe correct, practically a self-important waste of money.

But not for us.

That’s what I meant by larping. The vast vast majority of us here would probably not even notice if their systems went down for an hour. Yes, battery backup has its purpose. In a datacenter.

I mean, what’s on the line here in the worst case? 15min without jellyfin and home assistant? Does that warrant taking risks with old batteries or investing in new ones?

That equation might change if you’re in a place with truly unreliable electricity, but I guess those places have solutions in place already.

That’s typically a feature for servers or business desktops. Maybe your laptop has it, just look into the BIOS.

As I wrote in my other comment: try to be realistic about your needs. Chances are, pressing the power button every few months (if at all) is perfectly fine for your use case (and most others here).

And how much need is there for a UPS in this scenario - realistically.

Some of the people here take their admin-LARPing a tad too seriously. Most households have reliable enough electricity, and even if there’s an outage once every quarter, would a dead battery even help?

I advocate for being realistic with one’s own needs. Don’t build a five-nines datacenter for a glorified weather station or VCR.

https://youtu.be/sSiVYgot9SI

Not even two weeks ago.

In case you didn’t already do that: remove the battery. It’s probably dead anyway, you don’t need it and it poses a potential (albeit low) risk.