| I am divided on this. I think we as the software industry have serious performance issues, maybe except for some legitimate use cases like number crunching, video editing etc. I don't know of a non-trivial Rails app which uses less than a couple hundred MBs of RAM. We have a VM with a minimum RAM requirement of 8 GBs at work which runs a conglomerate of Rails APIs, which makes 16 GB a minimum on my laptop. The only reason the memory bloat/leak of a freelance Rails project I'm working on goes undetected is that Heroku restarts their dynos daily. For comparison, an Elixir/Phoenix app is using < 40 MB right now. AFAIK base RAM requirements of many Java apps are even worse. Opening Gmail in Chrome immediately eats 1 GB of RAM, vs. 60 MB for Apple Mail app. Many Electron apps like Slack, Atom and Spotify use hundreds of MBs to GBs of memory, vs. 150 MB for Sublime Text (5 MB for Vim!). And they are sluggish. As much as I love the open web (and I'm mostly a web/backend dev myself), I hate the fact that I often have to prefer native apps. I'm seriously considering other laptops right now, but can't find a serious alternative, especially considering the fact that there are no Linux-rated laptops close to my location. And shoehorning Linux into Windows machines is pain, I tried that for ~1 years both at work and at home. The best non-Mac laptop candidate I'm considering right now has a long article written by someone describing how to install Linux on it, with some "slight" annoyances like a non-functioning webcam and a problematic wifi in the end. Windows? Nothing there comes even close to iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh combo (and many other tools, workflows etc). And I haven't even touched the subject of design. None of this is heavy computing. I think we seriously need to consider slowing down this madness and try to improve. I'd normally love the 16 GB limitation so that we'd be somewhat forced to that direction but since there is no "kill the bloat!" initiative or something, we sadly need beefier machines for the short/mid term. |