I'm not much of a tech person and I have no idea if my observations are worth anything, but from where I'm sitting it seems computer technology isn't advancing anywhere near as quickly as it was from the 80s to the early 2010s.
The original Moore's law is dead and has been for a very long time, but the less specific trend of rapidly increasing computational power doesn't seem to hold much water anymore either. The laptop I have now doesn't feel like much of an improvement on the laptop I had four years ago at a similar price point. And the laptop I had six years ago is really only marginally worse.
So for those in the know on the relevant industry, how are things looking in general? What is the expected roadmap for the next 10 to 20 years? Will we ever get to the point where a cheap notebook is capable of running today's most demanding games at the highest settings, 144fps, and 4k resolution? Sort of like how today's notebooks can run the most intensive games of the 90s/early 2000s.
At that price you should just get a tablet. Laptops I'd spend no less than $1100 on for something thats functional. You can get a galaxy 7 tab which is pretty decent for around $500 bucks and will last you a good number of years.
Computers like a mid tier gaming rig looking at $1200-1500 to god tier for 3000+
Steam decks and ROG Ally are gaming laptops that have been getting a lot of praise for around $500.
What we are seeing is a lot more diversity in highly specialized devices. Like CPUs - do you want more concetrsted game fuel or do you want more data crunching? So theres more thought going into beyond I want low mid high tier but what do you want the machine to do best of?
To be honest, I just massively prefer the form factor of a laptop to a tablet. I never really got accustomed to the whole touchscreen only thing.
But other than that, I wouldn't call my 400 dollar laptop non-functional. I actually quite like it a lot, it's been great at the things I got it for. It's not really meant for gaming, but it does alright on non-graphically intensive indie-games that I absolutely could not play without a physical keyboard. My post mostly just stems from noticing it's not a huge improvement over a laptop from 2017 in the same way a PC from 2010 would be a massive improvement compared to a PC from 2004.
That's fine. My husband had a couple of $400 laptops that lasted maybe a couple years before they broke down they couldn't handle much more than one or two open tabs on a browser. That's the source of my prejudice.
If it works for you then cool it's doing what you need.
Definitely, I see where you're coming from on that . I've seen laptops priced similarly that belong in a trash can, it might be that I just got a really good deal on this one.
i actually think the op got a pretty decent new computer for $400.
the inspiron 3000 series can take 16Gb of ram, an nvme ssd and a 2.5" sata drive iirc. they could have a 5tb hdd to go with their fast ssd.
plus at the risk of sounding lame, it's a dell inspiron. how many non-alienware dells blow their mosfets regularly? I don't work with the 3000 series too often (a good sign!) but generally dells midrange/business/institutional offerings run forever.