If the last one is true, devs take note. If FAA can rely on slow, small storage for safety critical applications, you probably can reduce the resource requirements for your app and improve your customers’ experience and extend the life of their hardware.
There’s been an incredible expansion of computer hardware and networking in every dimension since the heyday of the floppy. And the floppy itself was a huge step up from technology of even a few years prior.
Your comment could have been made in any year since 1950, and it would have been both correct and irrelevant outside the areas most resistant to hardware upgrades. FAA is conservative, and should be, but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
Have software developers abused the hardware capabilities they have been granted? Of course they have. I’d love to see some care put into that. But beyond the basics, hand-twiddled hyperoptimizations are now an exercise for craftspeople. Or…AI?
The issue is they don't feel like supercomputers, because of how much they've been taken for granted.
My computer and phone today feel no faster or better to use than they did 20 years ago. They might be vastly more capable for niche applications, but for the day-to-day stuff it seems like we keep buying new hardware, so we can run the latest software at the same old speeds, mostly for security updates.
I have an M1 MBP... a bit old, but still does everything I need. When I click Calendar in the dock (when it is already open, but just haven't used it in a while), it can take 3-5 seconds to come to the front as the active app. It feels broken. This wait wasn't a thing 5 years ago on this hardware, nor was it an issue on a PPC Mac from 25 years ago. Yet now its' a problem... why? So the UI can calculate the refraction of the background image in the liquid glass? Should I be spending $2,500 on a new MBP just to switch more quickly from my browser to the Calendar? It doesn't make much sense.