> But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

Some of the individual components may still be relatively expensive, but overall I don't think this is true at all. Compare a 2026 macbook pro with a 2011 macbook pro at a similar price and the 2026 model is gonna blow the 2011 model out of the water on any benchmark you care to use.

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dijit 2 hours ago | parent [-]

“how long it takes to open the browser and load a web page”.

a 2011 laptop will likely perform the same on this metric with a contemporary website. (a 2011 website with a 2011 laptop, and a 2026 laptop with a 2026 website).

“how long it takes to load the mail app and send a mail”

probably the 2011 laptop out performs on this metric.

I’m sure the modern laptop is a few times more powerful in terms of raw compute, but lets not confuse compute with utility, because better laptops should mean more capabilities, not more shitty developer harnesses to make the same programs we had before.

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dwedge 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah this blows my mind. My work laptops were pretty powerful with 16GB RAM 15 years ago, 8GB was also fine. Now people say you need 32 or 64 minimum just to function, that these 8GB MacBook neos are "entry level" for students and kids.

I know it's all "back in my day" but back in my day (15 years ago) everything was generally software so the laptop was computing more, now everything is a website but the laptops need 32GB to not run like through tar.

Both of my arm MacBook pros hang from time to time doing basic tasks. It's ridiculous and at least one nice side effect of a ram shortage might be developers starting to care about memory footprint again

	▲	AlexandrB 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is another form of shrinkflation. Software quality (specifically performance) has cratered so that it could be built cheaper, faster, and with more ads.
	▲	neutronicus 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I have had the same work Windows box since 2019 and it has become agonizingly slow over the last 7 years. Anytime I look in Task Manager "Anti-malware Service Executable" is pegging at least one CPU core.