Memorial Day laptop deals won't fix your automation problems

I spent last weekend helping my nephew pick out a gaming laptop. Kid wanted something for college, but mostly for playing whatever the kids play these days. We found an Alienware 16 Area-51 marked down $650 at Best Buy, and I'll be honest, the specs on that thing would've made my engineering team weep with envy back in 2015.

That got me thinking about something that's been nagging at me for months.

The disconnect

Memorial Day sales are everywhere right now. Tom's Guide has deals starting at $549. ZDNet is pushing Apple, Dell, Lenovo discounts. Gaming monitors from Samsung and LG are flying off shelves. Consumer computing hardware is cheaper and more powerful than it's ever been.

Meanwhile, I called my old colleague Frank at a systems integrator in Michigan last week. He's still running control systems on hardware that would make that $549 laptop look like a supercomputer. The gap between what consumers can buy on a holiday weekend and what's actually controlling robots on factory floors is, well, it's getting embarrassing.

When I was at Kuka, we used to joke that our office PCs were always three generations behind whatever Best Buy was selling. That was funny in 2012. It's less funny now.

So what

Look, here's the thing. I'm not saying warehouse automation needs RGB lighting and 240Hz refresh rates. That would be ridiculous. But the computing power available in a $1,200 gaming rig (the Alienware my nephew got, basically) could theoretically run inference for vision systems, handle real-time path planning, and still have headroom for whatever else you throw at it.

The industrial computing market moves slowly for good reasons. Reliability, certification, thermal management in harsh environments. I get it. I spent twelve years living those constraints. But we're reaching a point where the delta between consumer capability and industrial deployment is... I don't actually know what to call it. Concerning, maybe.

The companies making industrial PCs aren't stupid. They know this. But their customers (the integrators, the OEMs, the end users) are locked into upgrade cycles that don't align with Moore's Law. Or whatever's replaced Moore's Law these days.

What I don't know

I'll admit I haven't dug into the numbers on this properly. It's a hunch based on conversations and what I'm seeing at trade shows. The actual installed base of industrial computing hardware, the average age of PLCs and IPCs running in warehouses right now, remains unclear. Nobody publishes that data in a way that's useful.