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Wow we're under $1/GB of RAM (in certain cases). Hard to comprehend. I remember getting a 1GB hard drive and how crazy that was, and then much later when a mec
by jasonjmcghee 3y ago
Wow we're under $1/GB of RAM (in certain cases).
Hard to comprehend. I remember getting a 1GB hard drive and how crazy that was, and then much later when a mechanical drive was $1/GB.
Seeing RAM hit that is something else!
- daemonologist 3y agoSomeone tell Nvidia (I know, I know, this isn't the fancy GDDR or HBM stuff.)
- why_only_15 3y agoHBM is often, as I recall, $30/GB for comparison
- wraptile 3y agoYet Apple dares to ship a laptop with 8gb ram that is not upgradable. RAM is dirt cheap but somehow the market abusers make it look like it's some expensive rare resource. Even Thinkpads now solder ram to sell you a +16GB upgrade for 100usd (6usd per gb, double the market price).
- yellow_lead 3y agoThe funniest thing about this is apple's engineer claiming 8gb on apple is equivalent to 16 on other systems.
- wraptile 3y agoThey're basically openly calling their userbase idiots to increase the profit margin by 20usd on a 1,500++ usd device. Incredible how we got to this state where the RAM market quality in consumer devices is quickly degrading because of corporate greed not because of any market or technical challenge.
- ponector 3y agoThat was always true. Iphone with 128gb, Mac with 8gb ram, etc. And MacOS in some cases says to user "fuck you! Next time buy apple device instead". Like to write to NTFS pendrive. But then in many cases the solution is to open Unix terminal to do what you want.
- kreetx 3y ago> Iphone with 128gb Is 128GB of disk in a phone too little?
- NikolaNovak 3y agoDepends on usage. My Galaxy Note 8 has a 400gb microsd card in it that's pretty full. Same for my android tablet. Tablets without microsd and 3.5mm (such as the fancy and expensive but practically useless iPad I got as a gift) are abomination upon God and man, but I'm a grouchy old geezer so take that opinion with a grain of consumer salt :)
- wraptile 3y agoI have s22 128GB model and it certainly is too little. I'm fully "in the cloud" and use google drive, photos and other sync extensively and recently I started to do more photography and videography completely casually (like while I'm on a hike) and the space limitation really shows to the point where I'm never buying a phone with <500GB. The space management is just so exhausting especially since everything is just so much bigger these days. I don't understand how these "premium" devices ship with the least premium problem out there - moving files and saving space feels like such a cheap problem that you'd expect on 100usd android not on a flagship.
- kreetx 3y agoRight, I guess people are different in that regard. Don't have statistics but I don't know people to whom 128GB would be too little. Could be living in a bubble though.
- listenallyall 3y ago
- hugryhoop 3y agoBut it's true, in fact it's an understatement: a 8gb mac makes you look way cooler than an 32gb pc.
- jtriangle 3y agoWell yeah, because with only 8GB of RAM you have much more free time to practice looking cool while your machine grinds away in the trenches of swapistan
- not_really 3y agoMaybe to the average consumer, but here it does not.
- verticalscaler 3y agoThis happens to be very much the case in phones for both RAM and batteries. Although not by a factor of 2.
- bzzzt 3y agoWhile not exactly true, it is a fact that Apple tries really hard to make the most out of a little memory while other systems (Windows, Android or Linux) piss away a lot of memory due to inefficiency, virtual machines etc and the only answer is 'just buy more RAM', which adds to cost, battery usage and is generally frowned upon as a solution to inefficient programming.
- ladyanita22 3y agoDo you have any real hard data that lets you to claim that macOS or iOS are more efficient than Linux or even Windows?
- bzzzt 3y agoI think it comes down to a few design decisions like not standardizing on a VM based language with GC (like Java/.NET) which leads to more memory consumption. Only allowing a single browser engine will also keep memory usage lower on iOS. Apple was also early with a good memory compression implementation. Of course, nothing will help you if you really want to run horrible applications, but at least the base system is optimized. You can run quite a lot of workloads even on an 8Gb Mac.
- ladyanita22 3y agoIn my experience desktop linux is significantly lighter than macOS though
- bzzzt 3y agoDepends on what desktop you use. A full Gnome or KDE desktop will eat a lot of memory.
- ladyanita22 3y agoGnome uses 2GB at most when not memory-constrained.
- tomas789 3y agoApple uses RAM and storage as price discrimination feature. And it also wants entry level machines so they can say “starting from …” It has nothing to do with the price of the memory itself. It is merely a factor that people are willing to pay for.
- blackoil 3y agoMy dad paid ~$100 for 4 MB of RAM and that was more than his one weeks income. Tech has gotten really cheap.
- richardw 3y agoI remember flying to the UK for a holiday, and all I wanted there was a 512KB upgrade for my Amiga. Not a jersey, not a watch, just a RAM upgrade.
- listenallyall 3y agoKinda depressing to realize that I'm probably older than your dad because I remember paying about $560 for 16mb RAM in about 1995, and that was to upgrade the 2nd computer I owned. (I also remember about a year earlier, thinking $400 for a new 1.0gb hard drive was a great deal -- forget megabytes, we're in the future now, an entire GIGA-byte baby!!!)
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoGet off my lawn, kid! I paid $300 for 4MB of RAM in ~1993.
- didgetmaster 3y agoThat's nothing. My company had to buy me a 4MB expansion card in the late 80s so I could run this new fangled OS called OS/2. It cost nearly $2000.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoHold my beer. The first PDP-11 computer our company bought, with 64kb RAM, cost 10 times my yearly salary.
- didgetmaster 3y agoOf course room-sized computers from the days of NASA were incredibly expensive. I was just replying to a comment about 4MB of extra memory for a PC in the early days.
- PeterisP 3y agoIt's amazing what performance you can get by simply putting in as much RAM as your data needs - if plugging in a terabyte or two of RAM ensures that all your data is "in cache" on a single system (+ e.g. a mirror for redundancy) instead of having to constantly read from disk or do horizontal scaling, that's a relatively cheap way to get a simple&performant system.
- gregw2 3y agoIf it’s easy/cheap to build 1-2 TB RAM systems, why are there so few I can rent from AWS? I settled for 768GB when I tried a few months ago and it wasn’t cheap. They did have like one HANA class system that was multi-TB at even crazier prices but I was kind of disappointed when I went to do something like you suggest. It was also impossible to get a lot of RAM without overpaying for a lot of cores I didn’t need and couldn’t use. I don’t disagree with your point about the optimization benefits of just caching data but actually getting a cache optimized system is seemingly another thing entirely. My perception is that it’s been hard to get >768 GB systems for a bunch of years now. But I don’t follow this space closely,
- bluedino 3y agoOne of the first people I know that "worked in computers" when I was a kid had a really fast 386 running Windows 3.0 I complained about how slow my 1 Meg 386 was and wanted a 486, he said he had 16 megs of ram (kind of insane at the time) and always said "the system will wait on you" That was somewhat true until you went to load a new file or program that wasn't cached yet, or when a heavy re-draw occurred and a 4mb 486 would dust it. You just didn't page anymore, which happened a lot back then.
- imtringued 3y agoActually, this is one of the easiest strategies to write slow software, because you're relying too much on the hardware to bail your poor decisions out. When running the software on worse hardware, you will see super linear slowdown.
- PeterisP 3y ago
- mlrtime 3y agoI used to work for a guy in the 90s that sold Ram over the phone. He would get clients that needed to buy a bunch and broker deals with manufacturers. This was before internet pricing. We would have a white board of all the different sticks and prices.