[blackoil]

Maybe this RAMmageddon will trigger a wave of optimized softwares that don't need GBs of memory for anything and everything.

[TrackerFF]

Let's see.

A) Programmers will get their shit together and start shipping lean software.

OR

B) New laptops will become neutered thin clients, and all the heavy lifting will be done by cloud service providers.

Which one seems more likely?

[DharmaPolice]

B would require a fairly large shift in approach since currently the primary way we interact with the cloud is via browsers which are probably the biggest single users of client memory currently.

[blackoil]

1. Most Web clients aren't light weight.

2. People will buy laptop with low RAM because that's only what they can afford (hopefully upgradable).

3. They'll crib Chrome being slow, and will be suggested to use lightweight apps.

[Ekaros]

B. But those neutered thin clients do not have enough ram to run software anyway even if all the real computation is in the cloud.

[throwaw12]

B sounds more likely because LLMs are already in the cloud and agents are thin clients

[sourcegrift]

If electron dies, I'll forgive the people responsible for this shortage

[array_key_first]

Part of the reason programs use so much memory is because of optimization, but of a different kind. Memory is fast-ish, so if you know or think that you will require X Y Z anyway then just load it in RAM. And, if you think you might need it later, don't bother unloading it. Just keep it around.

Garbage collectors also use similar strategies. Collecting garbage is expensive, so just don't until you need to. The extra memory usage in this case isn't a downside, it's an upside. Your code runs faster.

That's how Java and dotnet are able to achieve insane performance times in some benchmarks, like within 50% of native. They're not collecting garbage, and their allocators are actually faster than malloc.

If you've ever run a Java program at consistent 90% heap usage, you'll notice it absolutely grinds to a halt. I'm talking orders of magnitude slower. Naturally, this isnt highlighted in benchmarks, but it illustrates the power of allocating more memory.

[Cyph0n]

Or you won’t need RAM because everything will be hosted in the cloud and used via browser or just desktop streaming :)

[codebje]

Sure, but if the browser is the only thing that becomes more memory efficient that's still a substantial win.

[medi8r]

Yeah the server needs sunstantially lest ram per user than the PC. Probably 10mb per user vs. 8gb for client to have OS and browser up.

Apple could lead here. They sell feels not specs so they could down OS and Browser RAM requirements and sell lower RAM entry models.

[wasfgwp]

They did that. But when the AI craze hit turned that all the 8GB base model Macs didn’t have enough space for even basic models (in addition to the 1-2 electron apps you can run simultaneously).

Of course seems like local AI is more or less a flop in the consumer market at least?

But still IMHO even for general use macos with 8GB is almost unusable unless you use it like an Ipad.

[medi8r]

8GB is unusable, but is MacOS and Safari optimizabe? The point is they control the stack so they could reduce memory usage. It would be a big selling point, it could make a Mac "experience for experience" price competitive with PCs.

[vv_]

My Macbook Pro 13" Early 2015 w/ 8 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD is still very usable for what most people commonly use a laptop for - browsing the web, e-mail and streaming.