The Faster Tech Doesn’t Mean the Best Fastest Tech

In computing, there’s a tendency to see the fastest new thing as the best possible option. Those heavily invested in speed with cash to burn can find themselves studying the latest benchmarks, checking out the best cooling systems, and ultimately pushing their systems as far as they’ll go. This is a natural result of how the tech industry operates, as in some ways, faster legitimately means better.

This doesn’t apply to all ways, however. History is full of examples from computing and beyond that show that the fastest can be problematic in some cases, often not worth the cost of admission. Instead, it can be better to take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and ask where a more appropriate option might lie.

Your Use Case

Vulnerability to hype is a weakness we all suffer. Whether it’s a new phone, car, gaming console, or graphics card, we see what’s possible, we see how much fun the people in the ads are having, and we imagine ourselves following suit. With enough fanfare in the mass media, we can believe we’ll take advantage of everything the bleeding edge has to offer, but this is rarely true. Source: PixabayIn reality, most of us use new high-tech systems almost identically to how we use our older ones. This means that it’s far more useful to look back to what you already do when considering a new piece of tech instead of looking forward to what you might potentially enjoy. Sure, you can expand what you do, but there’s no point shooting for the moon in an area you’ve never explored before.

Consider if the type of gaming you enjoy most comes from iGaming services like a New Jersey casino app. Because this app is developed to work perfectly on a range of mobile and desktop devices, extra hardware speed won’t manifest as an appreciable gameplay enhancement. You’ll still have the same range of titles like slots, table, and live games, and you’ll only see performance enhancements if your old device was significantly underpowered. Changes might be more visible in highly demanding video games, but that raises another concern…

Appreciable Returns and Reliability

The age of each tech generation providing immediately obvious enhancements to the average user is behind us. Today, many gamers would struggle to see the difference between a game running on the PS5 and the significantly more powerful PS5 Pro, and that’s to be expected. Diminishing returns at high costs means the fastest tech often provides advantages we often won’t notice or appreciate, making them unnecessary.

Cutting-edge tech can also suffer reliability issues that can cause significant impacts when they appear. Intel recently saw this issue with its 13th and 14th generation of CPUs, and the company has proven decidedly lackluster in its ongoing support. This is bad enough in the PC space if we use systems for work; in a more crucial piece of tech like the notoriously poorly designed Cybertruck, issues of failure are even more profound.

What this all comes down to is that, despite our conditioning, the best piece of tech is always a highly personal question. While speed can play an important part, there are multiple other factors that we need to look at first before speed comes into play. The risk of a poor decision can cost you more than just money, and as anyone who’s faced hardware failure due to poor quality control can tell you, sometimes caution is the best strategy.