[pjmlp]

Of course they were, not even Apple has infinite stock.

What they have are sweet margins and deals in place that helped them to take some time until the inevitable came to be.

In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.

[bredren]

Hasn't Apple's dev environment for iOS and its non-macos relatives always been about working with as little memory as possible?

It seems like Apple, of all companies has been about doing more with less memory.

That would seem to have helped in the % of BOM getting wrecked by the supply chain and discipline of developers in its ecosystem.

[pjmlp]

Not really, they just don't support pagination, which is another matter, plenty of GB on those devices for Cordova, React Native, Webviews in general.

[keybored]

> In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.

I don’t understand why this comes up on all of these topics.

Dire need will compel a naked woman to learn to weave her own clothes, but there is no weaving machine for just making more efficient software. (American) Software developers are expensive, now I guess compute will either be expensive, more centralized, or have much more demand from competing interests (vibe coders who are implementing their own bespoke software or abandonware-for-one), and compute-for-code (GenAI) is a whole emergent engineering problem.

Then we hunker down and listen to or read a piece by Muratori, I guess, just practice some of those principles? But what seems to keep happening is that we get stuck by constraints that go beyond just writing more efficient code as a solo contributor on a solo project. That you can predict the efficiency of the code by the application domain suggests that there is a whole big system (of people and processes) above our heads that is not simple for any person or group of people to untangle.

[pjmlp]

Because the pendulum went too far writing garbage applications in Electron and friends.

Yes, Casey and friends are 100% spot on.

[dist-epoch]

There is another reason - if the cheap phones necessarily go up in price, but Apple eats the cost increase since they can afford it, then the cheap phones suddenly will cost about as much as an iPhone. That is a big ick.

A big selling point for iPhones is that they are much more expensive than the Other phones, so it is absolutely necessary for Apple to make sure it's phones keep a 50% price luxury bonus, or many will stop buying them.

TL;DR - ultra-expensive iPhones are a feature, not a bug, like ultra-expensive watches