4 ms·

If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8

• dofm 3mo ago
  To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone, so they are rather surprisingly on the forefront of this efficiency in consumer-facing devices. Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
  • alsetmusic 3mo ago
    > To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling. But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.
    • dofm 3mo ago
      The Neo is absolutely Apple's best-selling Mac; they've been caught off-guard in an epic way. (You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)
• AlexandrB 3mo ago
  This is very optimistic. I see a future where high hardware prices push more and more stuff to the cloud and consumer hardware becomes largely a thin client. Soon doing anything with a computer will require an internet connection because the "local" portion of software will be an electron UI that makes API calls to a server somewhere to do any "serious" work.
  • mbreese 3mo ago
    Don’t worry - the cycle will reverse again at some point and we’ll go back to more powerful local machines.
    • AlecSchueler 3mo ago
      Why do you expect it would be cyclical when the power capture would be extremely valuable to the main players?
      • linkregister 3mo ago
        And those main players will just be outcompeted. I'm sure DEC wasn't anticipating the PC revolution to take hold so quickly.
        • AlecSchueler 3mo ago
          I'm not sure they were quite as entrenched or quite as big as Apple or Google are today.
  • treis 3mo ago
    I have a T430 that came out 14 years ago that does "serious" work for me. For almost everyone the computers they use are wildly over speced for what they use it for.
    • Lwerewolf 3mo ago
      My 2nd hand ~$200 (minus a 256gb SSD upgrade) T400 was the best laptop I've ever had. Comfy everything, best laptop keyboard I've ever had, not worrying about dropping it on concrete from 2 meters (on the big extended battery, no less). Coil whine when switching p-states, no IPS, that's about it. Utilitarian laptops need to come back yesterday.
• jliptzin 3mo ago
  RAM prices won’t stay like this forever. If demand keeps up, suppliers will just start producing more.
  • StilesCrisis 3mo ago
    They're already producing as much as possible. Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.
  • ErneX 3mo ago
    Suppliers have ceased to exist in the past decades for building up fabs to satisfy demand and by the time they went online prices cratered. I’d assume is even riskier and more expensive now.
  • cubefox 3mo ago
    Yes. Several new memory fabs are expected to come online in 2028, one in late 2027: https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-tech/global-memory-chip-shortage-expected-to-last-till-2027/130395618 https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t... So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years. (Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)
• tyre 3mo ago
  I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task. If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps. What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
  • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > If things don't work, they will blame the computer Or the single app that slows it down.
  • j1elo 3mo ago
    Oh but I have seen totally tech uneducated people saying that they are tired of so many apps in their phones that slow things down. People do notice, and as soon as you start asking around groups who use mid- to lower tier level of Android devices, they do develop a diffuse intuition of what is and what isn't a "heavy" app. It is unavoidable, the cruft and bloat can be observed very visually in some apps that don't care about performance.
  • alsetmusic 3mo ago
    > I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task. I had a brand new experience today. I emailed someone explaining to "right-click, then…" and got a reply saying that they are left-handed, so my instructions were not applicable for them. Average consumers, for the most part, have a magic box. Only when someone is motivated to learn, like wanting to have a better gaming experience or having an interest in media production (or code), is there incentive to learn.
  • hombre_fatal 3mo ago
    There are a lot of things our devices could do to give users insight into basic things like which apps use a lot of resources, but they don't and it's a colossal failure for everyone (users, people who make efficient apps, pressure on people who make inefficient apps). iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it. Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them. One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.
• CraigJPerry 3mo ago
  >> it will be consumers demanding But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay. >> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of: When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters. When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth. I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac. If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
  • citizenpaul 3mo ago
    That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback. "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data." The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.
    • arjonagelhout 3mo ago
      I personally avoid Visual Studio Code as much as possible due to the scroll latency, so I think it is noticeable as long as you know what to look for.
    • StilesCrisis 3mo ago
      As I've aged, my ability to see tiny text has diminished, but I can still see 60Hz vs 120Hz perfectly well.
    • girvo 3mo ago
• soulofmischief 3mo ago
  In many contexts, compute and memory can be traded. Some apps prefer higher memory usage over higher CPU usage, because it requires less power and depending on the configuration, is overall less slow when many apps are contending for the CPU. It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.
• linguae 3mo ago
  This pressure works for pure software companies that don’t depend on hardware sales and that have competition. Unfortunately not all software vendors will respond to inflated RAM and SSD prices, since there are many important software vendors who have a vested interest in having users upgrade their hardware frequently. Microsoft still makes a good deal of money on OEM Windows licenses, Apple’s App Store and services revenue is built on regular sales of Apple hardware, and Google benefits from the sale of Android devices. The software needs to perform well enough on new hardware to not cause bad reviews, but sluggish enough (or with enough missing features) to motivate users to upgrade their hardware. Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons. The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.
• LtWorf 3mo ago
  > All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! They can't. They have no clue how. Electron is all they know and I doubt they can learn anything else. Also AI clearly hasn't replaced developers since the AI companies are also using electron and generating very buggy software.