[blank_fan_pill]

I bet we haven't even come close to realizing the potential of having extremely fast/high bandwidth cellular connections. Streaming 8k video to a phone seems silly but there are some brilliant and clever people out there who will find a use for that kind of mobile bandwith and apply it in ways you or I never thought of.

Bill Gates infamously said sometime in the 80's "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need" , and for the scope of computer applications at the time he was correct.

[thelazydogsback]

But (stipulating the attribution is correct) was Bill right?? Okay 640K is a little too far, but have we gotten 25,000 times more value out of the ~25,000 times more memory we now have? One could argue that we could have made much more ingenious use of, let's say, 1/100 of the memory and CPU we now have. We are so far at the end of the value-add curve, that we're running super-computers so we can clear up our complexion or make ourselves look like mice or potatoes in real-time video -- it's absurd.

[nwsm]

> One could argue that we could have made much more ingenious use of, let's say, 1/100 of the memory and CPU we now have.

The counter argument is that this is over-, premature, or unnecessary optimization. If we can put 2GB of memory in a computer for $20, why spend millions on R&D that will be rewritten to make it work on 128 MB?

There is also an environmental argument for your point, but everything will always be a tradeoff to companies trying to build and sell devices quickly.

[samatman]

You say absurd, I say awesome.

Why would we expect value to scale linearly with memory and transistor count? I would in fact expect it to be logarithmic: each doubling would lead to a roughly linear increase in cool stuff we can do.

I think that's what we see. Yes, our computers could be radically better experiences if it weren't for the bad habit of squandering improvements with layers of unnecessary abstraction and laziness. But the only thing standing in our way is those unnecessary and that laziness, so maybe we should stop doing that, now that real gains in speed are slowing down.

[Analemma_]

Gates never said that; the quote is nothing but an urban legend.

[sumedh]

I think in one of his AMAs on reddit he confirmed that he never said it and no software developer during those times would say such a thing that 640K is more than enough.

[takeda]

Yep, when implementing a simple OS for a class, it is clear that the 640KB limitation was imposed by the hardware at the time, not the DOS. So it wouldn't even make sense for him to say it, unless it was more akin to "it's enough for us".

[bluGill]

I don't know who said it, but it was in one book I had back in the day. That is a book from the era where 640k was something big companies might splurge on but only for systems that proved a need.

[chrisco255]

Yeah, VR comes to mind. But also speed gets reduced even with a small deterioration in signal. If you're getting 10-20mbps at full strength, you might get 1-3 Mbps with a weak signal. I would presume that 5G would be faster in weaker signal scenarios.

[Thlom]

I just got 200Mbps down on 4G. Granted it’s late at night and I’m in an office building by the highway next to a grave yard and a school, but still.

[chrisco255]

Yeah, with 1 bar of signal strength though? I work remote as a nomad and I frequently have to depend on 4G for connectivity. I don't get anywhere near 200 mbps in most parts of the U.S. I'm lucky to get 20, and often limited to the low single digits.

[hexane360]

The higher your max bandwidth, the quicker it collapses under signal deterioration.