There are two reasons for the incredible amount of money focused on tech companies. First, because of the 10 largest companies on the S&P 500, five are tech companies. Tech has made many investors a lot of money since Apple went public in 1980 and Microsoft in 1986. Second, the core technology powering all that software has sped up by a factor of 30,000 since Apple launched the Apple ][ in 1977.
As they repeat often in the financial world: Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Personally, I think too much capital has flowed into software startups over the last decade, and that the next decade or two are going to see far higher returns overseas, in companies that are filling in the last of the supply chains reaching the half of the world’s population so far left behind.
But while we wait to prove that out, this old techie still enjoys reminiscing about the amazing technological improvement in my lifetime, and this week’s that is a parody of Apple’s M2 chip infographic:
The 30,000x is 15 trillion operations per second vs. 500 thousand. Even more impressive is 20 billion transistors vs. 3,200, but do note that every one of the 3,200 transistors in the 6502 was drawn by hand, with none of the automation that no-doubt wasted millions of transistors on the M2.
I’m also old enough to appreciate the limitations of a computer that had just 64K of memory, while each of the images above are four times larger than that. 🙂
