Corey Quinn recently wrote about how the OS doesn’t matter anymore. A summary of his post: Once upon a time, your choice of OS in the enterprise environment would determine the level of support, the quality of updates, the amount of community help, etc . Now, thanks to the cloud, its increasing abstractions, and in-built support for a competent OS, people don’t need to bother with what OS their machine runs . You will get a decent and well supported one, you are now freed up to focus on your application. We’re going even further than abstracting the OS; with Kubernetes and serverless, the OS isn’t even in the picture . You can focus on your business/application logic, the cloud provider takes care of everything else.

On the consumer end, Apple is making waves with the M1 chip. Nandagopal Rajan writes: “Apple is saying that the iPad Pro is as powerful as the iMac or the MacBook and you are basically choosing a form factor for just that, the form factor.” The iPad Pro (a tablet) and the new iMac (a desktop computer) have the same specs! Same M1 SoC, same RAM, etc. Parody videos are calling the new iMac, an iPad on a stick . Apple is confident enough in the performance of the M1, that is moving the marketing limelight away from the no. of CPUs and GPUs and clock speed. Instead, they’re saying is “All of these are good enough for you . Just pick a size and shape you want”. This is an attempt to break away from the WinTel story where consumers are given Gigahertz, more RAM, more HDD, etc.

I like both these trends. They are the fruits of humanities wholesale adoption of computing and maybe an early sign of maturity. I agree with Joel Spolsky when he says that all abstractions are leaky, not knowing what OS your code runs on is great until one day your needs become complicated, and you need to max out performance. Not knowing the specs is great until applications get laggy and you want to improve your computer . But! The abstracted bundles work for most people.

When electricity initially started being available, Tesla and Edison famously fought over whether AC or DC was best. I’m guessing there were lots of opinions and battles on grid frequencies, grid voltages and a million other details too . Today, more than a hundred years later, we don’t think about these things all that much. “On”, “off”, “power’s gone” and “my plug doesn’t fit the socket” are what you’ll hear most people say . The medium is reliable, and our focus is on things like lights, fans, home appliances, and computers that run on top of electricity.

For quite a while, we’ve been hand-waving to consumers about clock speeds, X GB RAM, etc. Through the advancements in raw power and the ability of the cloud to give your infinite compute and storage, we’re finally approaching a place where most enterprises and consumers can ignore those details; and focus on the problems that matter to them . No need to look under the hood, whatever’s there underneath mostly won’t bother you.