We customers just sit back and let the torrent of astonishing cheap electronic devices keep coming, each generation more wonderful than the last.

It's all down to Moore's Law: crudely speaking, the idea that every two years or so the amount of computer bang you get for your buck in fact doubles (a true 'positive feedback' - each new round of invention hugely expands our ability to discover the next ones).

Remember the old fable of the Arab prince who won a bet against the Sultan and was asked to name his prize? "Nothing much - just put one grain of rice on a chessboard square, two grains on the next square, four grains on the next square, and so on until you have filled the board..." 

"Granted, my modest son..."

The first row of squares gives 255 grains. By the end of the second row the prince has over 65,000 grains. After that the numbers spiral upwards unimaginably fast until the whole planet is covered in rice.

One noteworthy feature of this powerful doubling sequence is that each doubling gives you the combined weight of all the previous doublings + 1 (eg doubling from 8 to 16 = 8+4+2+1+1).

When this applies to computer power, we are now somewhere in the middle of that chess board - and still going strong. Each couple of years sees new innovations giving us the combined computer power of all previous computer-power jumps, plus a bit more for luck.

It is impossible for most people to know what is going on inside their micro-chips. But the people plunging money into the research which drives forward Moore's Law have to be remarkably smart, in both technical and legal terms - it is one thing to find a brilliant new application, another to stop others stealing and marketing your idea at top speed.

A long-winded way of proposing that you read this excellent piece on the looming battles between Apple and Palm both in the market-place - and in the patent courts.

A new Palm Pre, please, when they come out in the UK.