[Wowfunhappy]

20 years ago is pushing it a bit. But 12 years ago, in 2008, I used a computer with 4GB of RAM in order to:

• Read the news

• Post on social media

• Make video calls

• Use instant messaging

• Create and edit word documents/presentations/spreadsheets

Today I use my computer for all of those same things... and yet they all require drastically more memory (and CPU, GPU, etc). What happened, and how does this benefit consumers? Yeah, modern web pages are resource-heavy—but to what end†?

In some cases, the requirements really did change. For example, I can now watch videos in 4K; my 2008 computer could handle 1080p, but I imagine it wouldn't have handled 4K as well. However, I suspect many users of old machines would be perfectly happy to drop down to a lower resolution.

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† Something I find amusing in all this... people often say they're glad Flash applets died because they were slow. Nowadays, instead of Flash, we use browser apps written in Javascript. I wonder how "slow" those apps would run if you threw them on a computer from the Flash era. (This isn't to discount other problems with Flash, although I do think it has a worse reputation than it deserves.)

[vbezhenar]

You can use computer with 4 GB of ram today for all things you've mentioned. It might swap here and there and not be as snappy, but generally it'll work.

I think that Apple just recently stopped to sell 4 GB computers. And their phones from the last year sells with 4 GB RAM while being perfectly able to do all the things you've mentioned as well.

[josephg]

Yeah, I agree - I don't think ram is usually the problem.

I used to have a 2016 dual core macbook pro with integrated graphics and 8gb of RAM or something. The machine was great when I got it, but 18 months ago it was limping along and I finally decided to get rid of it.

And it wasn't any 3rd party apps that killed the machine. Every time the machine started up, iphotoanalysisd or some random spotlight service or something would be eating all my CPU. It was always a 1st party Apple app which was making it slow. And the graphics felt laggy. Just moving windows around felt bad a lot of the time, even when I didn't have anything open. Xcode would sometimes lag the machine so much that it would drop keystrokes while I was typing. I had RAM to spare - it was a CPU problem.

In the process of wiping the machine, I booted into Recovery mode and it booted the 2016 recovery image of macos. Holy smokes - the graphics were all wicked fast again! I spent a couple minutes just moving windows around the screen in recovery mode marvelling at how fast it felt.

I wonder if reverting to an old version of macos would have fixed my problems. As far as I can tell, this was all Apple's fault. They piled up macos with so much crap that their own computers couldn't cope with the weight. I also wonder if they broke the intel graphics drivers in some point release somewhere along the way, or they started relying on GPU features that Intel's driver only had software emulation for.

Modern macos still has all that crap - the efficiency cores in my M1 laptop are constantly spinning up for some ridiculous Apple service or something. But at least now that still leaves me with 8 P-cores for my actual work. Its ridiculous.

I bet linux would have worked great on that old laptop. I wish I tried it before turfing the machine.

[Wowfunhappy]

Sure, it's possible to get by on 4 GB of RAM today, but it used to work a lot better!

Compare the memory usage of:

• 2008-era Skype and iChat vs Slack, Teams, and Discord.

• 2008-era web pages (including with Flash embeds) vs modern web pages.

• Microsoft Office 2007 vs current Microsoft 365.

And it's not only or even primarily memory, but also CPU requirements and so on.