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Lenovo Warns PC RAM Prices Will "Never" Go Back to Normal (www.thegamer.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 43 points 3 months ago (20 children)

Quite frankly, we abuse ram anyways. So much software uses way more ram than is actually necessary. I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals. Doing far more with far less.

It's the only thing we are empowered to do, buy less ram and use software that runs smoothly with less ram.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    At work we were upgraded to 16GB last cycle. 8GB would've been plenty if not for all the shit that forcibly runs in the background. Now even the 16GB models are struggling, and I mean struggling sometimes. While my userspace apps use less than 2GB.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago*

    I'm going to guess you're talking about Windows, correct? I work on a laptop (must be about 5 years old already) that I brought up to 64 GB RAM when I bought it (it was way cheaper than ordering with that, so I got it with 8 and then upgraded) only because sometimes I play on it. But when steam is not running and I'm just working, I've never seen it use over 2.7GB of RAM. Evidently, it has always run on some Linux distros (PopOS, Fedora, EndeavourOS and now CachyOS). The world is rigged to make all these things artificially expensive. Windows is a resouce-hogging malware that costs money, the computer parts manufacturers inflate prices to see if they can get away with it, the computer manufacturers go with that and then do the same, and we end up paying 10 dollars for what should otherwise be 1 dollar. As another person said, I also believe this will allow China RAM to catch up, which will end up flooding the market with same quality products, if not better, at way better prices. This will probably take a couple of years, but with their government subsidizing technology and most of their international markets the way they are in China, the funds will be readily available. Plus, China companies tend to enter difficult markets at a loss to take a good place if necessary, which is great for consumers. Just look at the blow they put on Mercedes, BMW and Porsche last year in Germany with BYD. Things will get better for us on the RAM front, it will just take a while.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Yeah, most people can probably be totally okay with 16GB (~150€ new, 50€ ddr4 used) too!

    We seem to have forgotten that RAM has always been ludicrously expensive, except for a little while a couple of years ago.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    16GB feels so low, but if we have to make due then the software we run needs to be crafted better. It's entirely possible. Also ddr4 is plenty good. I wager no one can tell the difference between ddr5 and 4 or even 3 honestly

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals.

    It's not that fundamental. It's just corporations skipping the optimizing step and just shipping because that looks better for their project deadline and budget. As long as complaining is limited and sales don't drop they don't care.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Agreed. Only way this happens is either open source, or new companies that recognize it as a competitive advantage. Get new users to favor your software, they grow up to get jobs and advocate for it there. It's a gamble and a long game though

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Optimization will actually get much worse because software will be designed to run “in the cloud” on servers that have much more resources than the average budget pc or smartphone that 90% of users use for computing. You will own nothing etc etc

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Software has been running in the cloud for nearly 2 decades at this point. But yes, I get your point. Their master plan is to get us all on terminals and use their clouds as a giant mainframe more or less.

    Doesn't have to be that way though. Not all tech needs to be the latest and greatest. So long as it's secure and is feature complete who cares how it looks.

    Ironically, with LLMs at our disposal, making new software is easier than ever. In the hands of skilled engineers tasks that took weeks take days. It's more realistic now for a single dev to sit down with a goal like "let's remake X software, but a 10mb memory limit". We can prototype this kind of stuff faster than ever, so we can use the very tools causing this problem to solve this problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    Run less software then. You can do that today.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    You don't have to run less as long as you choose good software.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Also true.

    But if you choose to run software that uses a lot of RAM, ask yourself why you haven't created an alternative that doesn't use a lot of RAM. If the answer is "I don't have the time to", then that's probably also why the developer hasn't made it use less RAM.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The answer to that question is that they're either lazy, ignorant or both. :D

    In all seriousness. I can imagine that a lot of developers who work on commercial products are given about 20% of the time and resources needed to make a good product. I don't blame them for doing what it takes to not get fired.

    That's why libre source software is so important!

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    Yeah turns out that RAM is cheap and dev time is expensive. Compared to what devs charge their employers in western countries, RAM is STILL cheap.

    With libre software, your employer isn't bleeding money for every day spent on optimization.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's more likely they are not incentivized to. When you are writing software for a living, typically there days the companies you work for prioritize delivery speed over everything else. If they prioritized memory constraints, software would use less memory.

    When you are rewarded for features and delivery, you end up with shit like electron. Not to even begin talking about how a whole generation of developers learned to code for the web and never touch os level dev....

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Well why would they prioritize memory constraints? It has literally no change to their bottom line.

    Say you're paying an engineer 100k a year. Reasonable cost in a western country, US based would be more like 200k+ when taxes and everything are involved. Tell him to spend 20% of his time optimizing memory usage.

    Now how much money are you spending to increase your userbase by maybe 0.01% (there can't be that many people who'd uninstall software they need just because it uses more RAM than they'd like)? And that's for every engineer you tell to spend time optimizing.

    Memory consumption only becomes important to the authors of the software when it's on the backend and you're serving so many users that your annual server costs get into millions, at which point you can save enough money that optimization is starting to be worth it.

    It sucks, but it is what it is. For everyone to start building super optimized software again, we'd all first have to move to 512 MB Pentium 4 machines so using more memory would actually mean lost revenue via lost customers.

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