Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thebruce87m 15 days ago
> Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.

It’s products like this that mean 8GB will remain fine for longer. If every base model had 16GB then sites like linkedin would just add more bullshit to use it. Let’s keep the bar at 8GB please - we’re not really doing anything different than I was doing 20 years ago with much less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561489

3 comments

While I worked at Apple a directive came out forbidding developers from adding more RAM to their systems without express upper-management permission. The reason was that the experience on stock-ram supported systems was getting really bad and management wanted the developers to feel the pain (so they would fix it). Note: dedicated compiler boxes were exempted from this (but still required management sign-off).

A similar directive came out about that same time forcing all managers to use the baseline phones, and limiting the upgraded models to only testing fleets, for about the same reason.

I think devs forget how efficient and blazing fast server rendered pages can be, and ultimately what a great user experience non-SPA applications can provide. It seems like the dev community has locked in on SPAs for everything. There is so much complexity and other overhead associated with SPAs. At the end of the day a browser is rendering HTML + CSS, JS can handle some additional interactivity. Presently, we have some very complex SPAs that are handling large amounts of state, large dependencies (js libs), often optimized assets, etc. I remember people bemoaning Flash apps. I kind of feel like SPAs are kind of becoming the new Flash app.
Neither is normal - mere 8GB of RAM in a new computer, nor website consuming over 1GB.

In a defense of the latter case - there are many decisive people in the company explicitly demanding the website to be so bloated and overengineered.