this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Sorry I'm a luddite but why does a cell phone need 12 GB RAM?
At these point phones are just full blown pocket computers. In fact, Ubuntu for Android lets you dock the phone and use it like a desktop https://www.theverge.com/2012/2/21/2812424/ubuntu-for-android-hands-on
I think it would be kind neat if you could just have one device you carry around with you, that way you wouldn't even need an cloud services to sync stuff like calendars or email across devices.
That sounds like a really neat idea, but I'm so clumsy I would be afraid to carry around my one and only computer all the time @.@
Could have it backup itself when it docks, so if you ever broke it or lost it then just restore the backup. :)
As with desktops, it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. RAM gets cheaper all the time so developers don't really worry too much about RAM usage. As a result, devices need more RAM if people want multiple things open. Rinse and repeat.
My desktop now has 32GB, because there, 16GB isn't really cutting it anymore. I generally have way more apps open on my phone than my desktop at any given time.
I do Android development at work. My workplace equipped me with a laptop that has 16 GB of RAM. It's not enough to have Android Studio open and run the debugger. ADB segfaults because it runs out of memory. Even when I'm not even doing anything at all, Windows already uses a significant portion of RAM available.
Now I'm not a computer person so I might not have all the details exactly right. But the moment that Chrome ram usage became uncapped circa 2016 was the moment computers went downhill. There moment immediately before was peak ICT.
I essentially had to scrap my 2010 MacBook Pro, which had worked perfectly up to that point. Even Apple hadn't pulled the plug yet. Every subsequent machine has been relatively more expensive and worse. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the year and price versus the performance.
The specs are getting better no doubt but most websites / software (except Lemmy) are demanding so many more resources, apparently just because they can, that it's all practically unusable. Bear in mind, I mainly use word, PDFs, and online databases (of plain text, word docs, or pdf files). I'm not doing anything that you'd expect to use a lot of ram.
I think more than 10GB and the phones can procreate among themselves. An additional 2GB on top gave the phones a bit of extra zip, and that's how the Mate 60 was born so quickly. Either that or something else. But if it's not this, America's top economists are all out of ideas.
exceptional post!
How you gonna run discord with less than 16GB of RAM??
I have a flipphone so idk how the app performs.
(This isn't a joke. Discord on desktop is basically just Chrome.)
No one writes native apps anymore, everything is a web browser running three gigs of JavaScript to track every scroll and tap you do. Takes a lot of memory.