For the last few years, hardware growth has been fast and rough. New processor and GPU generations roll out constantly, with storage formats seeing huge strides in both speed and use cases.

But now, as manufacturers find themselves struggling to surpass existing performance at the same energy levels, a shift is happening. Walking the floors at CES, we saw hardware makers realizing they have to be more specific, and laser focused, to catch up with work that companies like Google, Microsoft, and Intel have been doing at the platform level.

As we come closer to reaching the practical limits of traditional silicon, making it difficult even for giants like Intel to push technology further, we’ll only see the importance of software increase. New ways to squeeze more out of existing products will become the trend.

The move for hardware manufacturers, then, is to build in a different directions. Intel has done so by focusing on lower-power solutions, but there’s more specific refinement ahead of us. Virtual reality, wearables, and 3D cameras — to name just a few categories — is charging forward, and we’re starting to get ahead of ourselves.

That’s not to say software leading hardware is the tail wagging the dog — quite the opposite, in fact. We’ve recently been unimpressed with the extravagantly expensive systems that shatter our benchmarks. In most cases, that kind of power is overkill, so why not target what’s actually possible, instead of chasing fantasies?