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.

>> 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.