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Ask HN: Is innovative hardware basically dead?

by jmilinion on 3/5/13, 1:11 AM with 6 comments

Except for Apple, the military, a few smaller companies - I'm having a very difficult time finding any hardware startups or innovation companies that even matches that of the software world.

Yes, there's massive hardware efforts by the Dell and HP of the world but it's boring incremental stuff to keep the status quo. Nothing that will disrupt the world. Unlike my software brethrens who can choose between Google, Facebook, or thousands of innovative startups - finding innovative hardware companies is akin to roaming the Sahara looking for water.

What's going on? I want to go out and create but it seems so dead around here.

  • by rbanffy on 3/5/13, 1:41 AM

    If you want to build a personal computer, you'll probably need to make it Windows compatible. If not for other reasons, because users actually want Windows software. With that restriction in place, it's very hard to be really innovative.

    Multiprocessors only became mainstream when Windows XP became mainstream. I've used two and four CPU machines under NT and Unixes, but they would hardly be mainstream (even if they were not much more expensive than top-of-the-line single-processor PCs). And, under Windows, a dual 200 MHz machine was much smoother than a single 400 MHz one.

    The same goes for 64-bit machines. On the Unix side of the fence (which was also the RISC side), 64 bits were useful mostly for the extra memory. Having more than 4 gigs of RAM was outrageous until relatively recent times and the demand for larger address spaces was somewhat smaller than the one for more processing power but, again, it wasn't until Windows XP started supporting them that AMD64 processors became common. And the only reason it didn't follow the Itanium family is because it could pretend to be a 32-bit x86 well enough to fool Windows-based software.

    Before we get innovative computers like we did in the 80's and early 90's, we need to get rid of the assumption a PC is a machine that runs Windows.

  • by xyzzy123 on 3/5/13, 3:39 AM

    I guess it depends on what you do or don't think is innovative.

    With stuff kinect, leap motion, glass, Oculus rift, tons of UAV platforms, bitcoin mining asics (just kidding :), software defined radio, home robotics... I think the consumer hardware space is more interesting than ever.

    Applications are always "incremental" in the sense that you are generally finding marketable uses of existing sensors and technologies. But then again I don't see what I would call "truly innovative" software that often either...

  • by mschuster91 on 3/5/13, 2:13 AM

    I would not sign that, see the Raspberry Pi and its growing ARM based competition. This is the real innovation field, x86 has mainly halted, IMO mainly because of the backwards compatibility requirements.

  • by TheAntipodean on 3/5/13, 2:29 AM

    Have you considered applying to product design companies like Ideo?