One fun thing about “too big” projects like the F-35 is that the project management overheads cause a kind of recursive overhead, like the rocket equation, but applied to technical outcomes instead of orbital velocity. Any change isn’t “just” the change, it now has to got through review boards, subcontractors, liaisons, integration reviews, etc…

The result is that the F-35 computers are being “upgraded” (lol) to the same compute power as a first-gen Apple Watch… starting this year and finishing who-knows-when.

Meanwhile the F-16 which is “not as important” has already been upgraded with the same kind of chips as modern GPUs and has orders of magnitude more performance than the “flying computer” the the F-35 was supposed to be.

Weep for the poor C++ developers forced to shoehorn modern software into a computer that isn’t yet as powerful as a battery-powered consumer device most people have upgraded three times already.