The hardware of photography processing

An interesting post indeed.

As an amateur who does not print, I am sticking stubbornly to my 20 year-old 3.4MP Sigma SD9 and opening it's raw-only files with an old version of Sigma's converter. As to AI and stuff, I use the free GIMP and RawTherapee - updating them occasionally. Both still fast enough on my i5 Dell desktop machine.

Totally disinterested in Topaz, et al.

As to my little-used 20MP Lumix G9, I will not be upgrading to the G9 II - a waste of money for me.

My hardware is old by today's standards and will continue until it dies ...

We all live the same story, always more (to wash whiter than white)
I'm feeling overwhelmed by the new gadgets, and that since 1979, almost 45 years of technological developments.
And that's just the beginning. We always end up finding a justification for spending tens of thousands of dollars.
Good luck 😈

               I was also  using a soap powder analogy 😀 in a thread elsewhere. It is getting a bit silly with some reviewers product A had perfect flawless whatever feature , but mk II of the product is even more perfect even more flawless . No doubt mk III , mk IV and mk V will be better still 😀 I think unless you shoot in a very specific narrow niche that we are way beyond the good enough level .

Calling silkypix "not the fastest software" is remarkably generous 😀 Jesting aside more and more of the modern software's AI shenanigans are very much GPU dependent

Mac user here. Last winter, when Photoshop began to lag and give me messages that the latest versions, which I pay $10 a month to have, would no longer work, I laid my 12 year old mac mini to rest, and got a new mac studio with twice the ram. It is remarkably fast in whatever I've set it to do. I've yet to upgrade the 27" monitor, as the old one, at age 15, still soldiers on, is quite lovely, and allows me to have plugs for all the old outdated peripherals I don't yet want to replace. Contrary to warnings I had read, the old monitor doesn't slow anything down. Everything works, and works fast. My software is pretty varied: Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz, DXO, Luminar, OnOne, Corel Painter, and the usual productivity apps. The AI stuff in Photoshop takes only a few seconds to generate but I haven't asked it to do anything serious. I have not become enamored of AI (yet) but it isn't lag that keeps me from it, it's rabbits with 3 ears and people with 7 fingers on a hand. I do use it for background fill sometimes.

You’re not alone but what you describe has happened to me in a repeating cycle for 40-years. This is just another cycle, IMO.

I've avoided this problem completely by working in video production first, meaning I can't skimp on processing power. I'm always fearful giving out GFX raw files because most people's systems just aren't built for that.

Not the answer you might wanna hear but, some processes with the GFX cause things to slow down a bit. My solution - make your image smaller. Not sure what your working with or where it's going, but the PS ai tools are low quality currently. You're probably fine slicing your file sizes in half first, to help speed things up unless you're trying to do big prints.

Yep, just another cycle. However, I find my MBP 14 (about a year old) with the M1 Pro3 and 32 GB is pretty future proof (at least for a few years). Apple made the choice to integrate multiple AI optimized cores in the new chips using shared memory with the GPU and processor. AI applications are dominated by extensive linear algebra calculations (tensor manipulation) and Tensor Flow is an optimized tool for such processing and optimized processors can be a big help. As users demand more out of their processing S/W, vendors will respond and the more we ask the more stress we put on the H/W. On the other hand I have noticed that in C1 the masking tools have evolved much by the use of some AI techniques over the past year. They are promising a major upgrade in the next version. No mater what computer one has - at some point the S/W will expand exceed its capability. That is a corollary of "Moore's Law." 😉

Totally understandable. I switched from a PC environment to a Mac environment about 15 years or so ago. Having used both environments for decades, I do think that, for ME, Macs last a bit longer in the cycle that you are describing.

However, if I was still in the Windows environment and had lots and lots of devices all tied together in that environment, I doubt that I would switch to a Mac either.

Once it gets to the point of requiring a supercomputer to process a few shots, it's not photography any more to me. I think you've then lost sight of the picture taking or image capture aspect of it all, and pretty much reduced it all to electronic manipulation of data. Which is not photography. Far from it. Go back to the basics. Keep it simple, actually see & look at what you're taking pictures of. Stop micro analysing the data. See the big picture. You'll be far happier that way

Yeah, I get that. I'm not knocking it at all. It's just that for me personally, the less capable the gear is, the more I seem to enjoy using it. I keep losing sight of that, get carried away buying more capable gear again, and realise I'm not enjoying it as much. So I downgrade a bit. Or a lot. And the cycle continues.
Currently I'm thoroughly enjoying my little plastic IBIS-less G100, manual focus Laowa 10mm or PL 9mm, & Lumix PZ 14-42 kit zoom. Way more than I thought I would, as the G100 & PZ kit zoom are some of the most despised bits of gear on the interwebz. Very liberating, and complete lack of self imposed pressure. My post processing consists of sitting on my Sofa with my tiny little NUC and a monitor perched on the coffee table, & pressing the auto fix button in Elements lol lol. If I'm spending more time fiddling on the computer than actually taking pictures, then I tell myself I'm doing it wrong. You've just got to sort out what you really do enjoy doing, and not get sidetracked ha ha ha.
Once again, I get that lots of people love doing that. (the processing bit)

While I understand your sentiment, you are already required to use a “super computer” and have been for quite sometime.

blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2022/11/08/fast-forward-comparing-1980s-supercomputer-to-modern-smartphone

Your sentiment, I believe, is one of the reasons behind the popular resurgence of film. Whether that trend actually takes hold is another matter entirely.