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When I buy a refrigerator, if a model has insane power consumption that makes me think about my electric bill, I’d be less inclined to buy it. The refrigerator
by brap 11mo ago
When I buy a refrigerator, if a model has insane power consumption that makes me think about my electric bill, I’d be less inclined to buy it. The refrigerator manufacturer is going to sell less. So in a way, you can say that they’re definitely paying for those wasted resources.
For software companies it’s the same, in a way. They pay whatever the consumers deem appropriate. It’s just that consumers don’t really care for the most part, so the cost is basically $0. RAM is cheap, and if a company prioritizes shipping features over optimizing RAM, that’s almost always going to be the deciding factor.
- worik 11mo ago> RAM is cheap My time isn't
- brap 11mo agoHow expensive is it? Is it expensive enough to suffer a month of feature lag? A year of feature lag? A decade of feature lag? Probably not. Regardless, we’re talking about the average user. As the article implies, on average, users’ time is in fact cheap compared to the alternative, or maybe the time cost is simply insignificant.
- tcfhgj 11mo agoWhat is the alternative? Additional 100k cost per year vs time, energy and hardware for billions of users?
- hxorr 11mo ago> RAM is cheap Have you checked RAM prices this week?
- tcfhgj 11mo ago> It’s just that consumers don’t really care for the most part, so the cost is basically $0. It's zero, because most people cannot just not use WhatsApp, M$ Teams, etc. because WhatsApp has a monopoly on their centralized garden. It's not like a Matrix where I can easily switch clients like I can switch refrigerators. Even if someone would be able to provide an alternative, Facebook would just "kill" them like Apple did kill Beepers iMessage alternative.
- valleyer 11mo agoPower consumption of newly sold refrigerators is regulated by the U.S. government (and, I assume, other big countries), so I don't think this argument works in your favor.
- vultour 11mo agoFirst of all, RAM is not cheap. Second, the average consumer is not able to install more RAM even if it was. Consumer hardware often has barely enough RAM to run Windows.