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Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

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Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#141
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveniently, if you're watching a youtube video with an ad, switch apps and youtube reloads, you have to watch the ad again

You guys have ads on youtube?

Ad blockers don't work anymore, at least not with the version YT serves me. If it thinks that I have an ad blocker active (false positives happen too), it will only show a black rectangle and not even load the comments.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#143
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coupled with the current iOS situation it seems like things are… rotting. Everything in decline. Just "commoditizing". Last years microwave ovens were basically the same as 2024's also, and no one cares. You still need them and people still buy them and use them as much as ever, but at a replacement rate and not because of fashion or innovation. That is a good thing. It means the economy is doing what it's supposed…

So I take it then we’re seeing more efficient and cheap models as time passes right? Definitely not a software regression and higher prices?

We are and have been for many years now. Check out the "free" phone tier at your mobile vendor of choice. Those are great devices!

They may not match your particular tastes, but people with inflexible taste are always the last-resort market for manufacturers of commoditized products. People still buy from Hermès even though Shein completely dwarfs them in revenue, etc... That's the way it will always be with Apple too.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#144

Somehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!). A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the pro…

I feel like my 3GS was way better about resuming where I left off than any fancy new iPhone I’ve had in the past few years. Big name apps like Facebook, YouTube, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts seem totally disinterred in preserving my place. YouTube being the worst where I often stack a bunch of videos in queue, pause to do something else for a while and when I return to the app the queue has been purged.

I find myself saving a ton of stuff to my Watch Later list, because I can’t trust the Back button when using YouTube. This issue exists on the phone, web, and AppleTV. YouTube just likes to randomly refresh everything. It’s the most annoying “feature”.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the problem. Considering how many people are so averse to programming that they use LLMs to generate code for them? Not very likely IMO. I would like to see it happen, but people seem allergic to actually trying to be good at the craft these days.

I think we aren't far from AI being able to solve this sort of problem too. Imagine you are Apple and can just set an LLM loose on the codebase for a weekend with the task to reduce RAM usage of every component by 50%...

LLMs are trained on currently existing code.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#146
post #120

I don't think it's about memory shortage. It's that everything has become 20% more expensive in the past year, I'm being taxed to death, fighting with companies trying to money grab me, my electric bill is now $800, and I'm now too broke to buy a new phone every 2 years when most of my income gets eaten by the "system". I'll wait until either SPY does another 50% run or BTC does another 100% run and then I'll buy a n…

SPY has been flat when measured in other currencies btw. Everything's 20% more expensive and SPY is up 20% because US money is worth 20% less.

Yeah, so I'm not buying unnecessary crap this year.

If the "system" wants to drive more consumption, it's on the "system" to put more buying power into my hands. Double my salary, reduce my taxes, make BTC do a big run up, something. Otherwise I'm happy staying put.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#147

Somehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!). A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the pro…

I feel like my 3GS was way better about resuming where I left off than any fancy new iPhone I’ve had in the past few years. Big name apps like Facebook, YouTube, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts seem totally disinterred in preserving my place. YouTube being the worst where I often stack a bunch of videos in queue, pause to do something else for a while and when I return to the app the queue has been purged.

Now is bad too, but my recollection is that the iPhone 3G-era task killer was EXTREMELY aggressive and required "tricks" to keep your state in the one app you could run

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#148

Lest we forget, this memory shortage was deliberately engineered [1]. Thanks, OpenAI. [1]: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

These are Bonkers times we live in. Be honest, who had "Sam Altman kills Apple Computer" on their 2025/6 Bingo card?

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#149
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I too much of an idealist to hope that AI leads to less buggy software? On the one hand, it should reduce the time of development; on the other hand, I'm worried devs will just let the agents run free w/o proper design specs.

The average LLM writes cleaner, better-factored code than the average engineer at my company. However, I worry about the volume of code leading to system-scale issues. Prior to LLMs, the social contract was that a human needs to understand changes and the system as a whole. With that contract being eroded, I think the sloppiness of testing, validation, and even architecture in many organizations is going to be expose…

The social contract where I work is that you’re still expected to understand and be accountable for any code you ship. If you use an LLM to generate the code, it’s yours. If someone is uncomfortable with that, then they are leaning too hard on the LLM and working outside of their skill level.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#150

Somehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!). A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the pro…

> and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!).

Spotted the German lol

The general problem is that many people don't bother testing their apps outside of their office wifi with low latency, low jitter, low packet loss and high bandwidth. Something like persisting the state when the OOM/battery-save killer comes knocking onto some cloud endpoint? Perfectly fine on wifi... but on a mobile connection that might just be EDGE, cut entirely because the user is just getting a phone call and the carrier does not do VoLTE, or be of an absurd latency? Whoops. Process killer knocks a -9 and that's it, state be gone.

Side note: Anyone know of a way to prevent the iPhone hotspot from disassociating with a MacBook when the phone loses network connectivity? It's darn annoying, I counted having to reconnect twenty times on a train ride less than an hour.

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