The Setup: William Gibson (opens in new tab)

(I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust. Their SO has a hell of a job keeping them supplied with either 20 year old Compaq 386 lunchboxen or Linux boxes tailored to run DOSBox full-screen on the console without pestering them to do annoying GUI things every few days. This novelist is younger than I am.)

Gibson has repeatedly displayed a fascination with style and fashion and design language, rather than with random agglomerative collections of features bolted together into a Frankensteinian morass by a bored marketing committee. Given how Apple is oriented around design and the humanities, I find it very unsurprising that he'd be working on a Macbook Pro ...

This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows more about computers than you. Hint: Rather than look at technical details, he has always thought about computers from the most critical perspective: at the points where they interact with people.

I think it's fairly fascinating to discover that the author of one of the most notable cyberpunk novels doesn't really care about technology. (In fact, that's kind of the feeling you get from Neuromancer. There's loads of amazing technology but nobody's really fawning over it. It's just there, and it's just used.)

Software does a lot more stuff these days, with richer media, more layers of abstraction and more reuse of code. We mock Iris as a poor knockoff of Siri, but the thing has text-to-speech and speech-to-text linked in to it, and was put together in 8 hours! Try doing that on your 486/33, with the tools of the era. You'd be lucky to have a sound card (MPC was a standard to encourage OEMs of the time to include them, along with a CD drive, if you recall) and a color console I/O library, much less a network connection good enough for cloud speech recognition.

My point? People today are forever bitching about how little we've progressed, how software development is still the same, but I can't agree. I remember what software development used to be like. It was great in that everything was small enough to be fully understandable, but that's all that was great about it - otherwise it sucked, deeply.

It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.

You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it.

Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.