Probably I don't really get the point of this article, or the exact changes in the hardware ecosystem when the density scaling stops? Because although scaling became harder recently, I don't think we have reached the point where the processing performance increase per year is slowing down.
I have a problem with that paragraph:
Even if it takes a couple of years and several iterations for a self-taught engineer to reproduce, the resulting product isn't terribly out of date: the iPhone has only undergone a modest increase in clock rate over the past four years, from 1GHz in the iPhone 4 to 1.4GHz in today's iPhone 6. This relative stagnation is endemic, leaving a large window of opportunity for engineers to learn from and emulate the designs of the best.
The iPhone 6 was released with iOS 8, which doesn't support the iPhone 4 anymore. Also the CPU performance of the A8 in the iPhone 6 has 12x the performance of the iPhone 4. If you still want to use current apps, an iPhone 4 is really outdated.
On the other hand for the Novena laptop of the author the same principles might not hold true, but that has more to do with software than hardware, because especially Linux works very well with not so recent hardware. In my experience Android and iOS software became way more processing power hungry than desktop software did over the last 4 years.
Depending on what you mean by processing performance, the increases did slow down, significantly, around 2004-2005. At least for non-numerical single-threaded workloads. Had they continued at the same rate, CPU performance would be anywhere between 5 to 10X higher today.
GPUs are a better measure of performance improvement, because they more easily add cores, and so aren't as affected by the clock rate plateau - for GPUable computation.
I have a problem with that paragraph: Even if it takes a couple of years and several iterations for a self-taught engineer to reproduce, the resulting product isn't terribly out of date: the iPhone has only undergone a modest increase in clock rate over the past four years, from 1GHz in the iPhone 4 to 1.4GHz in today's iPhone 6. This relative stagnation is endemic, leaving a large window of opportunity for engineers to learn from and emulate the designs of the best.
The iPhone 6 was released with iOS 8, which doesn't support the iPhone 4 anymore. Also the CPU performance of the A8 in the iPhone 6 has 12x the performance of the iPhone 4. If you still want to use current apps, an iPhone 4 is really outdated.
On the other hand for the Novena laptop of the author the same principles might not hold true, but that has more to do with software than hardware, because especially Linux works very well with not so recent hardware. In my experience Android and iOS software became way more processing power hungry than desktop software did over the last 4 years.