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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

#161

Post by kalleboo »

canthonytucci wrote: post #45
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #8

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.

Even system apps like Photos have completely given up on state restore. I'm deep in an album comparing a photo to something on the web? Sorry, Safari needs all that RAM, Photos all is kicked out, and Photos can't possibly remember you were inside an album (despite, you know, all the APIs Apple specifically has to manage this [0]). They USED to care about these things and made it seamless enough that you weren't supposed to know that the the app was killed in the background, but they just don't seem to care anymore

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/SwiftUI/restoring-...

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

#162

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

canthonytucci wrote: post #45
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #8

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.

Youtube/Google just make these shitty small annoying decisions just to make the iOS experience that little bit more annoying than it has to be.

Case in point — Youtube background play doesn’t pause when Siri makes an announcement, so if you’re listening to something you get two voices over each other.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt and figure it must be some kind of iOS thing, until I was listening to Audible one day and it paused automatically. So it’s just a google thing, not a third-party apps thing.

i have the same issue with the Youtube queue — this is something that could easily be persisted, but they just choose not to.

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

#163

Post by whackernews »

ajross wrote: post #128
torben-friis wrote: post #21

The latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising. The just announced pixel is the same phone as last year. I know it sounds like a usual complaint, but look at the actual specs, it literally is the same phone with differences so small that hey might have passed as regional variance. As for the Samsung, the screen can darken when looked from the side for privacy. That’s pretty much it. Price increased though. Couple…

> 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 we can spend our resources more efficiently (on other fashion-driven junk in different market segments), making us richer.

Richer… so we can buy more stuff I guess?

Anyway a good microwave can last you 30 years not even joking.

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

#165

Post by teeray »

al_borland wrote: post #140
londons_explore wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%...

From everything I’ve seen, LLMs aren’t exactly known for writing extremely optimized code. Also, what happens to the stability and security of my phone after they let an LLM loose on the entire code base for a weekend? There are 1.5 billion iPhones out there. It’s not a place to play fast and loose with bleeding edge tech known for hallucinations and poor architecture.

> LLMs aren’t exactly known for writing extremely optimized code.

They are trained on everything, and as a result write code like the Internet average developer.

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

#166

Post by dawnerd »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #8

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…

It’s not just mobile safari, safari on desktop does the same thing even with lots of memory available. Whatever they’re doing to limit a tabs resources needs to go, it’s so frustrating.

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

#167

Post by mschuster91 »

darthoctopus wrote: post #4

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

> Well, actually, there is one other important reason for this article’s existence I'll tack onto the end – a hope that other people start digging into what’s going on at OpenAI. I mean seriously – do we even have a single reliable audit of their financials to back up them outrageously spending this much money…for this? Heck, I’ve even heard from numerous sources that OpenAI is “buying up the manufacturing equipment as well” – and without mountains of concrete proof, and/or more input from additional sources on what that really means…I don’t feel I can touch that hot potato without getting burned…but I hope someone else will…

And I'd say if it ends up being shown there even is the slightest hint of impropriety going on, trial him. Up to and including capital punishment for the entire board and C level - what OpenAI already has done, even if legally on paper, IMHO is the biggest market manipulation in history, and it's not just one competitor that is suffering but society as a whole.

I don't have an issue with big companies and their super rich investors engaging in petty bitch fights. By all means, hand me some popcorn and soda. But the RAM situation, with everyone not being super rich and flush with cash from AI crazed investors being screwed royally? That is far beyond acceptable.

We need to send a message: you can't mess around with the world economy at that level without feeling serious repercussions. The lives of the billions are not playthings for the select few.

And if it turns out to be outright market manipulation, engaging in deals he doesn't even have the money committed for by others, much less actually have it on his balance sheet? Then it's time for the pitchforks, not even Madoff was this ruthless.

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

#168

Post by jfim »

rescbr wrote: post #154
al_borland wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From everything I’ve seen, LLMs aren’t exactly known for writing extremely optimized code. Also, what happens to the stability and security of my phone after they let an LLM loose on the entire code base for a weekend? There are 1.5 billion iPhones out there. It’s not a place to play fast and loose with bleeding edge tech known for hallucinations and poor architecture.

If you ask an LLM to code whatever, it definitely won’t produce optimized code. If you direct it to do a specific task to find memory and cpu optimization points, based on perf metrics, then it’s a completely different world.

You can also tell it the optimization to implement.

I asked Claude to find all the valid words on a Boggle board given a dictionary and it wrote a simple implementation that basically tried to search for every single word on the board. Telling it to prune the dictionary first by building a bit mask of the letters in each word and on the board and then checking if the word is even possible to have on the board gave something like a 600x speedup with just a simple prompt of what to do.

That does assume that one has an idea of how to optimize though and what are the bottlenecks.

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

#169

Post by rescbr »

h4kunamata wrote: post #130
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #8

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…

That is an Apple problem and keep in mind that iPhone doesn't do multi-task, the fact that you are having problems with 12GB is not surprised to me. I have to use a Macbook M4 at work with 24GB, I have an AMD Lenovo Ryzen7 with 32GB running Linux Mint Cinnamon. It is infuriating how slow this Macbook is, even to shut it down is slow asf. macOS is not different than Windows, I cannot wait for COB to get back to my Lin…

I have a personal 16 GB M4 Macbook Air and my wife’s work computer is a 24 GB M4 Macbook Pro. My laptop runs circles around her work’s.

Companies install so many invasive shit in the name of security theater and employee control that there is lots of waste going on.

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