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 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free...

All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.

As a steam deck user I've become very bothered how some games run like a dream while others are unplayable, seeing beautiful games running perfect on the hardware proves it's more than possible, but studios aren't allocating the resources to make things run efficiently.

If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...

> but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks

"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

I did my first ESP32 project recently and was amazed you can get a system that starts up Micropython, then a Wifi AP, DNS, and Web Server in a second or two total and uses less than 512kB RAM. And thats with a high level programming language.

Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again.

There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.

The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.

I'd say some of those extra abstractions and frameworks are actually making many jobs harder.

Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro

Sometimes abstractions make performance better too. We can’t all be experts of everything so using a well-optimized library is a boon.

Also it's no longer a toy for hobbyist but a necessary tool to participate in society

Yes, when you're used to using the modern web with all its bloat it can be a huge surprise when you build something in C or Rust - everyday computers are actually incredibly powerful.

Fully agree with you. I am a frontend developer. On my work machine spotify uses maybe 300mb of memory, but on my home pc with opensuse? Image what it uses... 1.1GB.. The same as my brave browser with 4 tabs open. What is going on.

a single leetcode tab is taking up up to 700mb of memory...

"What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh Away"

not even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about.

your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)

your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)

Something being easier is not a waste, it’s literally the purpose of every technology.

It's interesting to contrast this with the attitude taken by the FFmpeg open source developers. They still hand write assembly code because performance and power efficiency is so critical that every clock cycle counts.

https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...

This is such a reddit take. Yeah electron takes a lot of resources, but there’s also a lot of software that never would’ve been made in the first place if we didn’t have it. It’s not as simple at pointing to (comparatively) inefficient software and saying that’s bad. Software is ubiquitous now and a big part of the reason for that is that frameworks and abstractions made software much easier to create.

I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday optimizing out a function call to save 36 nanoseconds: stop whining about electron.

Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.

I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.

I recently liberated a couple of old Intel Mac laptops by installing Linux. These machines were not receiving system updates anymore. Even on the older machine with a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM, GNOME runs well (XFCE would probably be a better choice to save RAM for programs, though). On the newer T2 machine with 8GB of RAM, GNOME feels basically as snappy as on my modern gaming PC.

Same. And my current daily driver laptop cost me $400 9 years ago. You can still do a lot for incredibly cheap.

Compared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care

My 2012 thinkpad still works well.

I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.

Do you use Discord? How much time does it take to start it?

True but you can also buy a RPI or other cheap computer and do literally whatever you want with it. Those walled gardens and portals serve a purpose for many users who don’t care about being restricted for the benefits that come with it.

depends on what the computer is, I'm running a desktop with linux, is there really anything I can't do on my computer that was possible in 1996?

If we are talking specifically about Macs, I remember my Mac in 1996 didn't even have a command line interface.

Were you? That $6k Apple in 1996 was just as 'walled garden' as it is now.

Speak for yourself. I have a modern machine running Fedora. What walled gardens are you talking about? Buying a Mac is a choice that you may make, but I never will.

In my case, yes, because I used to be a Linux user. I still am, but I used to be too.

Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.

I'm sure you can find an equivalent to ClarisWorks or Photoshop 3.0 that works on a Raspberry Pi.

> having a pc or mac was something of a luxury

Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.

And if you spent all that money on a single computer there was the expectation of sharing it with the whole family.

A CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc.

But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.

Wow, I didn't know that Camcorders were that expensive at the time. That's $2k today according to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm .

Replaced yes, but with generally something worse. Enough to get by, just like a swiss knife is enough, but a ful toolbox would be way better. And with the advancement of technology, a current version would be way more palatable.

I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.

In some meaningful ways they are measurably slower.

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Reminds me of this story about every app being sluggish on a relatively new machine, compared to equivalent apps running on a 20+ year old machine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28, 346 comments)

Until recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.

Well I had to move music off a 10 year old laptop and I can assure you things aren't slower in the ways that matter. It was borderline unusable. I am happy with SSDs and not getting viruses off of websites, personally.

“unc” is the new “boomer”

What you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.

M3 Ultra w/512 GB was released 1 year ago for $9500. I bought one (with a friend's Apple Employee Discount) and originally had a bit of buyer's remorse, because performance was less than some of the Cloud Providers - but recent releases of the quantized GLM 5.2 models are actually pretty speedy and are probably as good or better than any online model I had a year ago - and the discontinuation of the M3 512 has erased that remorse finally.

As I understood it, chipmakers aren’t scaling up in record time because the last few times they did that the market fell out from under them, and a bunch of them went out of business.

If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.

I come from th blue collar world of the central valley California. Every mechanic, car salesman, construction manager if not worker, owns their own home and has two kids. It's interesting how 60 miles east is a whole new world where you need a crazy fancy job to buy a home.

>we...consider buying food a luxury

We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.

https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...

> I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.

Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.

Waste and sanitation jobs in Toronto start at $39k and get up to $120k+ if you’re driving the truck and leading a team I would imagine we actually pay our municipal employees proportionally _more_ than we did back then.

>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver

you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them

I mean truck drivers make much more money than you'd think.