21–30 of 264 posts
A web browser and the basic mobile app will be fine.
The iPhone 17 Pro has the most RAM and it's only 12GB. Hell the iPhone 16 Pro only had 8 GB. The vast majority of consumer cases don't need it. I doubt Apple and other manufacturers will go beyond that to keep prices down.
In practice I expect most optimizations will come from "stop doing stupid stuff" and not "use fancy advanced algorithms." But that's a cynical perspective so don't be cynical like me.
For this incentive to exist, the app needs to be such an obvious memory hog that users start identifying it as the source of the problem. Even then, a lot is required for most businesses to prioritize this (presumably) temporary issue at the cost of things like: participation in the AI race, other features, bug fixes, new markets etc. Heck, sometimes software is so inefficient that it costs developer and tester produ…
For cloud apps where the costs are largely hidden from users, the user has no way of doing that analysis. I agree with the second part of what you said, though: I expect businesses to just raise their prices in those cases rather than systematically focus on actual difficult engineering problems.
Besides, have you heard about "virtual memory" and "swapping"? Nowadays, SSDs (and especially NVMe) are quite fast, so thrashing is much less of an issue.
If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device.
There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.
Why games? Because there is a clear point where people stop buying games. Minimum hw specs are known before buying.
If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected. If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device. There are two factors: existing…
I don't think at this point in history limitations drive the the way we do things, abundance does.
Abundance and limitations are a bit of ying/yang phenomena in terms of driving things, you don't have one without the other.
Igor Stravinsky: "Constraint drives creativity"
(I also don't see Amdahl's Law --which is fundamentally about limitations -- going away any time soon.)
I do agree that there are compounding abundancies present.
Some big-tech orgs (that have their own hardware) will take costs into account, but they already do that. The "optimization" is more likely to be business-optimizations; "this can be slower if it uses less memory", rather than inventing new stuff.
Note that I am excluding any of the big AI labs. They are definitely going to be working to figure out how to use less memory, but that's primarily not related to the direct cost.