>> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

RAM prices won’t stay like this forever. If demand keeps up, suppliers will just start producing more.

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

Shouldn't that all fit into less than 64k?

Apple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes.

Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.

So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”.

Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.

Oh, you mean those shitty Web UI frameworks with worse performance on modern hardware than native GUI programs from 1995?

Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.

> instead of unobservably better performance

That's... quite the choice of words there

The problem Is when the performance problems becomes observable. Only after a specific scenario like low power mode for example

> instead of unobservably better performance.

It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.

The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.

> work on things users care about

Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.

[dead]

Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.

It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.

"Hey Opus, migrate this site from jekyll to astro" doesn't work?

Even beyond the library scope. I suspect most complaints in this regard are around electron/web tech, but a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases and you get the productivity of a high level GC language with it. Go has even a smaller footprint.

There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.

Yeah, I recently went to the DMV, the only way to even get a place in line in person was on a phone. Also needed some kind of web browsing device to get basic online-only services.

The problem isn't the necessity of a computer to participate in society, as those are everywhere in public for free(My library and unemployment office has PCs free to use), it's the mandatory need for smartphones, as the library has no public smartphone to borrow you.

Because so much modern software is a web browser. The application bundles in its own version of Chromium.

Built natively, the same app could use an order of magnitude less memory, while being functionally identical.

It’s not Bill any more, it’s developers choosing to use Electron as an app development platform. It all seemed fine when 64 GB of RAM was cheap.

> This is such a reddit take

You might consider that your comment would have been just as strong without the opening put-down.

I'm fine with Electron, not so fine with basic websites being so bloated now that even a modern computer lags on them. Those were achievable in the past.