Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by letitbeirie 1773 days ago
The spread of capabilities is bigger now.

In 2000 a developer might have been developing on a Pentium 3 with 128 MB of RAM, but they could reasonably expect their audience to be using at least a 486 with 16 MB of RAM because that was the minimum spec for IE4.

Now you're stuck with trying to impress people with a Ryzen Threadripper and 64GB of DDR5, but your webapp still has to support everyone's iPhone 7 (with 2GB to share with iOS and everything else they have running) for as long as Apple does.

2 comments

What I think is even more different is that someone with the 486 in 2000 was used to the idea that they wouldn't be able to run some software, but unable to run a website? Unheard of, it's just broken.
Apple still supports the older iPhones. For example, the iPhone 6 that doesn't get the latest iOS version anymore (stuck with iOS 12) is still supported by regular security updates (the last iOS 12 update was 54 days ago).

Apple supports (at least security wise) probably more devices than you think.