Have the laws of supply and demand been suspended? Capital is gonna pour into memory fabrication over the next year or two, and there will probably be a glut 2-3 years from now, followed by retrenchment and wails that innovation has come to a halt because demand has stalled.

If "performant" devices are not widespread then telemetry will reveal that the app is performing poorly for most users. If a new festure uses more memory and sugnificantly increases the crash rate, it will be disabled.

Apps are optimized for the install base, not for the engineer's own hardware.

Can confirm, I'm currently requesting as much RAM as can fit in the chassis and permission to install an OS not too divorced from what we run in prod.

On the bright side, I'm not responsible for the UI abominations people seem to complain about WRT laptop specs.

How many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?

> a significant part of the world is already running lower powered devices

but you cannot consider this in isolation.

The developed markets have vastly higher spending consumers, which means companies cater to those higher spending customers proportionately more (as profits demand it). Therefore, the implication is that lower spending markets gets less investment and less catered to; after all, R&D spending is still a limiting factor.

If the entirety of the market is running on lower powered devices, then it would get catered for - because there'd be no (or not enough) customers with high powered devices to profit off.

It has also made it easier than ever to build native applications that use the os provided toolkits and avoid adding a complete web-tech stack to everything.