Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

idc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 341 posts

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

#171

Post by zozbot234 »

xenadu02 wrote: post #156
Animats wrote: post #5

The DRAM shortage and lack of fab capacity have also caused the Playstation 6 to slip to 2029 or so.[1] Game consoles are vulnerable. They need a lot of RAM and have to sell at a moderate price. The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again. "While memory prices are projected to stabilize by mid-2027, they are unlikely to return to previous level — making the sub-$100 segment (171 million…

> The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again Sure thing. I'd take a look at IDC & similar firms' forecasting history before worrying too much about what they say. There is an AI boom right now. There will be a consolidation cycle at some point. When that happens half the players, if not more, will disappear. The huge hardware budgets will go with them. We also can't be certain that the…

HBM is not normal memory. It uses a lot more area per bit and has lower yield too. So a Gb of baseline DRAM and a Gb of HBM are very different measurements, the latter equates to so much more in terms of volume.

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

#172

Post by al_borland »

jfim wrote: post #168
rescbr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Can we assume at this point if the problems are well known, the low hanging fruit has already been addressed? The Boggle example seems like a pretty basic optimization that anyone writing a Boggle-solver would do.

iOS is 19 years old, built on top of macOS, which is 24 years old, built on top of NeXTSTEP, which is 36 years old, built on top of BSD, which is 47 years old. We’re very far from greenfield.

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

#173

Post by torben-friis »

nickjj wrote: post #155
torben-friis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I’ve heard of that “bug” from personal friends so you’re not imagining things.

Did it happen to them in the last few days? Did it self fix itself? I wish there were better options for phones. It's absolutely crazy to me that a phone can be perfectly working one day and then it starts getting issues like this out of the blue. It makes it completely undependable. All I want is a phone I can trust traveling with where I'm not going to wake up the next day and then the phone starts draining 3-4x fa…

I had the conversation yesterday, unexplained battery drain as of then unresolved.

They mentioned people complaining on Reddit about battery drain since the last update, but I haven’t personally seen the threads so take it with a grain of salt.

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

#174

Post by robinwassen »

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.

They kind do if you prompt them, I had mine reimplement the Windows calc (almost fully feature complete) in rust running with 2mb RAM instead of 40mb or whatever the win 11 version uses as a POC.

A handwritten c implementation would most likely be better, but there is so much to gain from just slaughtering the abstraction bloat it does not really matter.

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

#175

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Liftyee wrote: post #112
expedition32 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a China phone with amazing specs but it KEPT KILLING EVERYTHING. Hardware is pretty useless if the software that drives it is useless. I don't know it probably works better in China all I know is that I went back to good old Samsung.

It's a pervasive Chinese phone problem. I've used many and they all have "Battery saving" features on by default, which means killing background apps after a while apparently. Battery life is great, but newly installed apps sometimes don't work as they should. The market demands must be different there. I've disabled "battery optimisation" for all the apps I need to stay open (and some apps even prompt me to disable…

> some apps even prompt me to disable it!

That's social engineering to get themselves more background network activity. I wouldn't trust such an app.

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

#176

Post by intrasight »

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 really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.

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

#177

Post by nomel »

inigyou wrote: post #70
vessenes wrote: post #3

Meanwhile Apple iPhone sales were up 23% YoY end of last year. It'll likely be a good year for Apple, with a little more room in margin to make some plays, and a lottt of cash.

That was last year when the DRAM price crisis hadn't happened yet...

8th sentence of TFA:

> By contrast, Apple and Samsung are better positioned to navigate this crisis. As smaller and low-end-positioned Android vendors struggle with rising costs, Apple and Samsung could not only weather the storm but potentially expand market share as the competitive landscape tightens.”

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

#178

Post by mikestorrent »

intrasight wrote: post #176
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 really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.

Yes, the web was a mistake; as a distributed document reading platform it's a decent first attempt, but as an application platform it is miserable. I'm working on a colleague's vibe-coded app right now and it's just piles and piles of code to do something fairly simple; long builds and hundreds of dependencies... most of which are because HTML is shitty, doesn't have the GUI controls that people need built in, and all of it has to be worked around as a patch after the fact. Even doing something as simple as a sortable-and-filterable table requires thousands of lines of JS when it should've just been a few extra attributes on an HTML6 by now.

Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be.

We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

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

#179

Post by tootie »

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…

I think even going back a few generations, phones are improving at a much slower pace. You can only jam so many cameras onto a phone frame before users lose interest. A few years back there was a mad dash to add AR features to flagship phones so they could wow us with apps that never materialized. My last few upgrades have been almost imperceptible. Buyers just don't have a good reason to buy new phones every two years.

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

#180

Post by guidedlight »

intrasight wrote: post #176
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 really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.

You are describing Wirth’s Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Post reply on HN