Distributors entering Flatpakland

Distributors entering Flatpakland

The comparison is even more stark if we move down from the high end CPUs to the low end; back in 2007, if you were in the market that today buys a Celeron N4020 (4 MiB LLC) with 4 GiB RAM, you'd have been buying a Celeron 365 or equivalent, with 512 KiB (0.5 MiB) LLC, and 512 MiB or 1 GiB of RAM.

Indeed, the gap between "as cheap as possible" and "low end for rich customers" machines has been shrinking over the last 15 years; you've gone from having 1/4 the RAM and 1/4 the LLC in an "as cheap as possible" machine as compared to "low end" to 1/2 to 1/3 the LLC and 1/2 the RAM of a low end machine for a rich person. The remaining gap is in mass storage - where a "low end" machine will have an SSD nowadays, a "cheap as possible" machine will still have a HDD because of the size differential between a $30 HDD and a $30 SSD.

That said, that gap may change, too - HDDs are limited in terms of how cheap they can be because they are precision mechanical systems, where an SSD scales down in cost; it was already true 8 years ago that if 30 GiB is sufficient space, an SSD was a cheaper option than a HDD, and the space on really cheap SSDs is likely to grow over time.