Very true. I bought my current small N100 minipc for just over 100 GBP a couple of years ago, direct from Shenzhen. It had 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, gigabit ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, build-in soundcard, graphics hardware support for up to three 4K monitors(!!), built-in usb hub, and a 4-core cpu that I found I could compile a kernel on in about the same time as a 2015-era xeon, which is to say, pretty good. That spec would have been a monster machine in 2000, if you could even buy one that powerful back then. I think I paid something like 130 GBP for the new one, including shipping to UK; whereas the 2000-era machine would have cost thousands. Absolutely astonishing, if you stand back and think about it. Of course this is a tiny box by comparison with no expansion slots etc, but it's still very impressive compared to the year 2000 PC. Unfortunately the prices seem to have doubled over the last year, I looked up how much they cost a couple of months ago and it's more than double what I paid two years ago.
But compared to how much you had to spend to get a pc in 2000... its a drastic change, especially if you think of it in terms of the number of hours you have to work to buy one. And the difference to an original 1983 IBM PC-AT with it's 10 MB hard drive, 640k dram, and 286 cpu, is stark.
It's gone from this, back in the early 80's...
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to this, around the year 2000...
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to this, today...
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... and the new one is much more powerful, and with greater capacity, than the old ones.
So... what has enabled this change? Shrinking lithography geometries, achieved by massive invesment in the production technology by companies like ASML, TSMC, the dram and flash manufacturers, and we have got to give full credit to Intel, coz' it's still an Intel cpu that is at the heart of it, and indeed the architecture and reference design will all come from Intel (and perhaps microsoft has some input); IBM is mostly out of the picture now, since they dumped their PC divison, whereas in 2000 they would still have played a major role. I tried to find a spec for the number of transistors in the N100 SoC, I can't find the number published anywhere, but it would not surprise me if it's of the order of 5-10 billion transistors on the chip. The real magic, then, is the production technlogy, that permits a chip like that to be economically manufactured, with a high enough yield, permitting it to be sold at a low enough price, such that that the machine itself can be profitably retailed for just over 100 GBP.
Another observation is that the amount of material in the thing is much smaller than the 2000-era PC, which means less junk ultimately going into landfill, which can only be a good thing. Hopefully the spoil-heap and chemical pollution arisiing from the minerals and hydrocarbons they had to mine and refine to build the thing is also much smaller, along with the energy consumed in the manufacturing process.
Another remarkable feature that hardly ever gets mentioned is that the new one is backwards compatible to the old one, which means that the software written 25 years ago can (mostly) still be run on the new one today. Which is also something that we are so used to that we hardly notice it, but is a very important feature. Hang on to your open architecture, kids... if they ever take that away, you'll be paying a heck of a lot more.
And one more... the modern machine consumes only about 10W in normal operation, I've measured it with a power meter. That year 2000 PC probably burned around 80-100W, or more, by comparison. Which makes a big difference if you're running 1000 of them across your company.
It would be fascinating to know the factory gate price, and the factory BOM; I wonder how much Intel sells the N100 for in quantity. The industry in south china appears to be split between a group of companies that specialize in making the motherboards, and another group of firms that design and build the finished units, and then finally retailers, although often the assemblers themselves seem to retail the boxes directly. I've noticed that you can usually find 3 or 4 different label 'makes' on aliexpress, all selling similar looking machines, that have the exact same hardware spec, and obviously are being built using the same motherboard. The assemblers differentiate their products by the mix of components they put in the box and things like the level of bios customisation and support, the one I have actually has quite a good bios with lots of settings available. The motherboard in my "Soyo" branded machine comes from an oem called Weibu
https://www.weibu.com/index.php?catid=16 , which looks like being a big OEM. So the final assembler designs the case, specs the box, buys in the motherboard and other components, and does the build, test and homologation (assuming they do that stuff!).
Which makes me wonder how much of the production is subsidised by their government, and to what extent these low-priced goods are being dumped on western markets, essentially at below the cost of production. That retail price I paid two years ago would be pretty much impossible for any western manufacturer to achieve. And I don't think it's down to labour costs now, since labour is only a small fraction of the build cost today, as most of the production is highly automated. It's a real shame there aren't any british firms making these, I'm sure we have the companies that could do it it if made business sense to do so. AFAIK there are no US or european manufacturers of these boxes either, perhaps Taiwan still make some, I don't know about South Korea. Even at this year's prices which are around double what I paid two years ago, I think a western manufacturer would struggle to make any real money on these kinds of products. So I can understand, to some extent, why IBM got out of that market, for example.
And I almost forgot... software! That box as sold comes with a full copy of the latest version of windows installed. When I bought it I looked up the retail price of the equivalent version of windows, say if I had wanted to build my own machine and install windows on it... and I think it cost almost as much as the price of the whole finished mini-pc. So Microsoft are in there somewhere too, they must have done a deal with the south china firms to allow this to be shipped with a valid copy of windows. I'm pretty sure they're not installing pirated versions of windows like they did in the old days, it all looks fully legit. So that's another part of this picture; it's all pretty remarkable. Of course freebsd went onto mine as soon as I got it.
We are so used to this kind of progress that we don't notice it until you actually sit down and figure it out. There has certainly been very big changes in PC technology since the year 2000.
