I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip

This story from [Point in the Cloud](https://pointinthecloud.com/2026-08-19-144600.html) isn't just a fun tech experiment — it's a signal flare for where the industry is heading. For years, we've been conditioned to believe that serious computing power requires serious investment. But when you can offload heavy lifting like Photoshop onto a chip that costs less than a chocolate bar, you're fundamentally challenging the economics of hardware startups. This hits at the heart of the democratization trend we've been tracking at Startup Signal. Every time the cost of a core technology drops by orders of magnitude, a wave of new founders enters the market with products that were previously impossible. If a £0.60 chip can run Photoshop, imagine what it can do for IoT devices, edge computing, or even AI inference at the edge. The barriers to entry aren't just being lowered — they're being vaporized. The Hacker News community is clearly buzzing about this, and for good reason. It brings up critical questions: What does this mean for the traditional PC market? For cloud computing providers who charge monthly fees for compute? For the very notion of what a "computer" is? This single experiment pokes holes in the assumption that you need expensive infrastructure to do serious work. I'm particularly fascinated by the implications for emerging markets. If the computing cost floor drops to near zero, then the next billion users can be served with hardware that's essentially disposable. That opens up possibilities for education, healthcare, and local commerce that we've only been gesturing at. The question now isn't whether the technology is capable — it's whether we have the vision to build on it. At Startup Signal, we're betting on that vision.