[dented42]

That analogy doesn’t really work here. Because there is a downside. It’s slow, takes up a ton of memory, lots of disk space…

When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up.

[dtech]

That is more a tragedy of the commons thing. For each individual app the comparison holds true

[IgorPartola]

And since we do have app stores as gate keepers, this could easily be remedied by the app stores. They wouldn’t even have to penalize you. Just put a score on there for app size (and app responsiveness) compared to the median in that category. Put this near the star rating from the reviews. Executives don’t generally care that you as an engineer want to reduce an app size by 10% but they really really care about how the app looks on the app stores because that’s what they show to people and what they are judged on.

[kulahan]

Tragedy of the commons or just a really bad industry?

[leptons]

It doesn't "take up a ton of memory" and if you think 47MB is "a lot of disk space" then maybe you need a bigger disk. Most laptops have at least 250GB, so this program would take up about 0.0188% of disk space, which is frankly not a lot. I had PDF files way larger than that. And you only need to run it once, you do not need to keep it loaded and running all the time, so it doesn't "take up a ton of memory".

[lostlogin]

This is how we have ended up with huge cars and huge houses etc. Storing huge volumes of unneeded junk isn’t solved by have more space. Store less junk.

[leptons]

You can live however you want to live. I will live however I want to. 47MB is not worth worrying about, at all.

[BobbyTables2]

47MB is about 3x the space once required by a widely used commercial graphical operating system. It was even enough to also include Microsoft Word with plenty of space left.

How far we’ve fallen.

[leptons]

You're living in the past. Hard drives are now up to 36TB. Hard drives are always getting bigger. 47MB isn't worth worrying about, at all.

[mlhpdx]

This is such a weird rationalization. You’d sell a kidney to be a 10x developer but making an app 1000000x smaller isn’t worth a thought? Maybe that’s why the former hasn’t happened.

[leptons]

Where the hell do you get me saying I would sell a kidney? What are you smoking?? Weird? Your comment is the only weird thing here.

[superb_dev]

Yup and those 36TB are cheap and common! Right?

[wolpoli]

While it is true that hard drives have large amount of storage, it is unlikely that are any Mac with a 36TB hard drive attached that needs to overcome WiFi time limit.

[leptons]

Doesn't matter what size hard drive is in the mac. If you can't spare 47MB to solve a problem you're having with wifi access then you are doing it wrong.

[charcircuit]

47 MiB only costs $0.0002. What has fallen is storage price.

[anonymars]

These crappy WiFi portals are known for having ample download speeds too, right?