> Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes?

Everything you listed worked for decades with a lot less RAM, but was also more limited and potentially different in substance in critical ways. It's the "Mom I want X ! -> We already have X at home" meme, where the "X at home" is some poor version of what was requested.

I understand some people could still enjoy a retro style experience, but I wouldn't give up on my HDPI displays for instance. Or touch support. Or keeping 40 tabs open instead of hand managing my tabs or rely on some dumb auto-close algo.

Spreadsheets can now have dozens of thousands of line and still be snappy to manipulate, we can play high def videos while doing actual work without freezing the whole system. Photoshop and Lightroom used to be crash junkies for even basic operations and people would baby the settings to aleviate that; with the RAM we have now it has become a somewhat decent situation (still crashes, just way less)

I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.

PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy. Nowadays phones will be enough for most of that, and people will mostly avoid doing them if it requires opening a computer. That's where we have so many budget management apps for instance.

So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.

I agree with you on HDPI, which is why I mentioned it. That's a tangible benefit for all users, which would be impossible without the increase in RAM.

40 tabs open at once? That doesn't need a lot of RAM if websites were programmed to do what they actually do: Display text and images.

I don't think touch needs any special amount of RAM, would it differ for the operating system than a mouse?

Photoshop and Lightroom <- These I think fall into the category of special use cases for professionals, which absolutely need more RAM than a home user. For somebody who only occasionally wants or needs to do a bit of advanced photo editing, it's okay to wait a bit longer for operations.

> I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.

Are you sure about that? If you actually sat down to only work, without having YouTube videos open or other things going on in the background? If you close your Amazon Black Friday tab you already liberate 500 megabytes of RAM.

> PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy.

No, in this case it is you who didn't understand or didn't want to understand. Nowhere did I say only. But the things I listed are what normal people do mostly. And nobody would want to type a long report or do spreadsheets on their phone.

> So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.

Not at all. Most computers are used by office workers at their job, and I'd bet that most home computers are also used for non-intensive purposes. But I think you're right in what direction things are moving.