The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

The title made me think Carmack was criticizing poorly optimized software and advocating for improving performance on old hardware.

When in fact, the tweet is absolutely not about either of the two. He's talking about a thought experiment where hardware stopped advancing and concludes with "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

> "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

Interesting conclusion—I'd argue we haven't seen much innovation since the smartphone (18 years ago now), and it's entirely because capital is relying on the advances of hardware to sell what is to consumers essentially the same product that they already have.

Of course, I can't read anything past the first tweet.

And I'd argue that we've seen tons of innovation in the past 18 years aside from just "the smartphone" but it's all too easy to take for granted and forget from our current perspective.

First up, the smartphone itself had to evolve a hell of a lot over 18 years or so. Go try to use an iPhone 1 and you'll quickly see all of the roadblocks and what we now consider poor design choices littered everywhere, vs improvements we've all taken for granted since then.

18 years ago was 2007? Then we didn't have (for better or for worse on all points):

* Video streaming services

* Decent video game market places or app stores. Maybe "Battle.net" with like 5 games, lol!

* VSCode-style IDEs (you really would not have appreciated Visual Studio or Eclipse of the time..)

* Mapping applications on a phone (there were some stand-alone solutions like Garmin and TomTom just getting off the ground)

* QR Codes (the standard did already exist, but mass adoption would get nowhere without being carried by the smartphone)

* Rideshare, food, or grocery delivery services (aside from taxis and whatever pizza or chinese places offered their own delivery)

* Voice-activated assistants (including Alexa and other standalone devices)

* EV Cars (that anyone wanted to buy) or partial autopilot features aside from 1970's cruise control

* Decent teleconferencing (Skype's featureset was damn limited at the time, and any expensive enterprise solutions were dead on the launchpad due to lack of network effects)

* Decent video displays (flatscreens were still busy trying to mature enough to push CRTs out of the market at this point)

* Color printers were far worse during this period than today, though that tech will never run out of room for improvement.

* Average US Internet speeds to the home were still ~1Mbps, with speeds to cellphone of 100kbps being quite luxurious. Average PCs had 2GB RAM and 50GB hard drive space.

* Naturally: the tech everyone loves to hate such as AI, Cryptocurrencies, social network platforms, "The cloud" and SaaS, JS Frameworks, Python (at least 3.0 and even realistically heavy adoption of 2.x), node.js, etc. Again "Is this a net benefit to humanity" and/or "does this get poorly or maliciously used a lot" doesn't speak to whether or not a given phenomena is innovative, and all of these objectively are.