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Hold up. It's been ~14 years since Apple shipped machines with 2GB of memory as base their base model. macOS (and iOS) have incredibly good screen reader supp

Hold up. It's been ~14 years since Apple shipped machines with 2GB of memory as base their base model. macOS (and iOS) have incredibly good screen reader support, as well as all of the things you're complaining about in your original comment at the top of this thread. Clearly those things are absolutely gobbling memory, and yet you don't seem to connect the dots that they're directly contributing to high memory requirements of macOS? I mean, 8GB on stock machines today is barely manageable. You can't buy a Mac with less than 8GB today; you can't even buy a phone with 2GB or less. I'm not sure you're in an position to rail against high-memory bloat in computing today. p.s. I say this as someone who uses macOS as their daily driver and has for a very long time

grishka 4y ago
Screen reader support by itself doesn't gobble memory. Android has had it for ages, and still runs on devices with less than 1 GB RAM (Android Wear watches). Running several instances of Chromium though... You'll probably run one anyway at all times as your actual web browser, but additional ones in the form of "oh so easy to build" Electron apps don't help. In Apple's eyes, though, you should absolutely ignore other browsers and use Safari exclusively. It might not be as much of a memory hog as Chrome — I haven't researched this, this is simply my guesses. I also heard that M1 Macs are better at memory management compared to Intel. Again, I don't have any concrete evidence to back this up, but knowing Apple, it's believable.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> I'm not sure you're in an position to rail against high-memory bloat in computing today. Nobody is a hypocrite for buying X gigabytes of ram but also wanting the naked operating system to use a much smaller amount, or wanting single programs to use a much smaller amount. > macOS (and iOS) have incredibly good screen reader support, as well as all of the things you're complaining about in your original comment at the top of this thread. Clearly those things are absolutely gobbling memory, and yet you don't seem to connect the dots that they're directly contributing to high memory requirements of macOS? What makes a screen reader gobble memory? And it definitely shouldn't gobble memory when it's not running.
- devinprater 4y ago
  Mainly the TTS engine being ready for input, stuff like that. Of course you could go to Linux where you have to enable assistive technologies support before the whole desktop understands that they should work with screen readers. I'm guessing that there is where accessibility does take up RAM and resources.

grishka 4y ago

Screen reader support by itself doesn't gobble memory. Android has had it for ages, and still runs on devices with less than 1 GB RAM (Android Wear watches). Running several instances of Chromium though... You'll probably run one anyway at all times as your actual web browser, but additional ones in the form of "oh so easy to build" Electron apps don't help. In Apple's eyes, though, you should absolutely ignore other browsers and use Safari exclusively. It might not be as much of a memory hog as Chrome — I haven't researched this, this is simply my guesses. I also heard that M1 Macs are better at memory management compared to Intel. Again, I don't have any concrete evidence to back this up, but knowing Apple, it's believable.

Dylan16807 4y ago

> I'm not sure you're in an position to rail against high-memory bloat in computing today. Nobody is a hypocrite for buying X gigabytes of ram but also wanting the naked operating system to use a much smaller amount, or wanting single programs to use a much smaller amount. > macOS (and iOS) have incredibly good screen reader support, as well as all of the things you're complaining about in your original comment at the top of this thread. Clearly those things are absolutely gobbling memory, and yet you don't seem to connect the dots that they're directly contributing to high memory requirements of macOS? What makes a screen reader gobble memory? And it definitely shouldn't gobble memory when it's not running.

devinprater 4y ago
Mainly the TTS engine being ready for input, stuff like that. Of course you could go to Linux where you have to enable assistive technologies support before the whole desktop understands that they should work with screen readers. I'm guessing that there is where accessibility does take up RAM and resources.