[palata]

Because it has been the same problem for decades: the more RAM developers have the more RAM their code uses. There is nothing special for 32GB, it was always the case.

Only when the resources are limited do we see optimization being done seriously.

[Grimblewald]

while slop probably plays a part, there is a lot going on that is now possible that wasn't previously. Many of the things we take for granted wouldn't be possible without the extra memory. Do I need 16gb to read text and view images? no. I don't even need 1gb, but I do need that extra ram if I'd like to listen to music while I write text that is actively spell checked, while searching my open document against ones i've already written to look for reusable content while leaving my spreadsheets open, browsing with multiple tabs open, while handling some beefy data file a colleague has sent through, all of which sounds like a reasonable workday for many. Multitab browsing alone isn't some massive stroke of genius that no one had thought of prior, while clever it was also not present earlier because of technical limitations.

Sure I don't need 32gb to do all that, but who knows what fun things will come from having that extra budget?

[palata]

I would like to completely agree with that, but when my laptop consistently starts venting like crazy whenever I open a particular webpage, I have to blame the webpage.

An example I have is a food orders website, which takes 4 seconds and 10MB to load, where all I want to do is go unsubscribe for the weekly order (where I need to unsubscribe every week because it's opt-out, I guess it's better for them). This page is crap because it can, not because it brings some value it couldn't without using all that compute power.

Then as a software engineer, many colleagues literally say "memory is cheap" very often, which kind of hints towards the fact that they don't care about optimizing for memory :-).

I honestly cannot really think of something I do now that is really useful for me and that I was not already able to do 10 years ago (hint: I don't use a copilot to code).

[blharr]

Obviously, large data files will need large memory, but aside from that, music and spellcheck take little memory, and web browsing takes so much

For 90% of browsing like searching and reading articles or watching video or using email, all of those worked on the almost same functionality 10 years ago with a fraction of the memory.