> Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35.

You're conflating the attributes of the plane with the attributes of the components that make it up.

The buttons in cockpit are not "stealth". You don't shoot the pilot seat out of the cannon. Etc...

Just because the plane is stealth and armed, doesn't impose any special requirements on the computers! They're on the inside of the plane, whereas the military nature of fighter jets is mostly relevant to the outside: stealth shape, stealth coatings, armor, etc...

Similarly, the special maintenance requirements of fighter jets are mostly to do with the high performance engines and physical stresses imposed on their airframe by high-G manoeuvrers. They're nothing to do with the computers, which have no moving parts and generally are serviced infrequently.

This whole discussion reminds me of how many people don't realise that many things are fungible and are designed to be fungible. There's this tendency to "label" things so as to break this mental model on purpose. The most common example is OPEX versus CAPEX -- it's all just money!

A more directly relevant example is a customer that was grumbling about how their email was slow to sync to their phones. They were blaming the phones, because they knew in their gut that "phones have slow CPUs", right? Meanwhile, the primary mail server had about 1/3rd the computer power of the phone it was synchronising to! Literally a fraction of the CPU power, memory capacity, and even disk capacity throughput. It was hilarious.

What had happened is that they "invested" a lot of money ($50K) on a big and important rack mount server... 15 years ago. The purpose of the server is critical to the business. They mentally labelled it as "production", "enterprise", "server grade", "highly available", and so forth. That's the box they put the thing into in their brain because that's the purpose the thing served. Never mind that after more than a decade, the phone in their pocket outperformed the server in every metric! They had mentally labelled those devices as "consumer", "gadget", "end user", etc...

These are just human labels. They don't affect the metrics, the objective measurements of reliability. The "enterprise grade" server had been crashing weekly. It had disk reliability issues (old mechanical drives!). It had capacity issues. Etc... It was labelled as reliable, but it was basically a worthless anchor on the organisation. If they had replaced it with a $500 laptop, they would have been measurably and objectively better off as a business! They just couldn't bring themselves to this realisation. It just wasn't "clicking" in their brain that it doesn't matter how much money they spent, or how flashy the sales presentation was, or what the purpose of it all is.

To me, this whole thread is that story all over again. Everyone here keeps going on about how the F-35 has "this" or "that" attribute that consumer electronics don't, while completely ignoring the fact that its computers are crazy slow and out-dated even when compared to directly comparable fighter jet aircraft such as the F-18!

PS: After doing even more research, I'm starting to suspect that the cause of the suckiness of the F-35 computers is that the tender requirements probably included "must be entirely manufactured in the US by US citizens", which is a common clause in military contracts. That would dramatically shrink the pool of options, reducing the performance and quality that is available. Similar issues occur with Russian military procurement, because their internal chip fab capability is much worse than what the US can produce.