Let's hope the component shortages will drive performance improvements in Apps as it will be unfeasible to expect higher specs to fix performance bottlenecks. Constraints can drive good behavior.
Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
241–250 of 341 posts
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.
Visual Basic solved that. The web is in many ways a regression.
Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#243Somehow, 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…
The fact that the current iphone is how much more performant than a 3gs and we are doing what exactly different with it? Still scrolling instagram, text, whatsapp, maps, shitty mobile web, literally nothing has changed about how we use these devices. Nothing. These things should be like camels and have the battery last for weeks by this point. The hell is all that power even going toward? These phones are like Hummers. Just wasteful.
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 al…
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.
Are they not? Gui libraries are like button(function=myFunction). This isn't rocket surgery stuff here at least the gui tooling I've used.
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#245Let's hope the component shortages will drive performance improvements in Apps as it will be unfeasible to expect higher specs to fix performance bottlenecks. Constraints can drive good behavior.
I remember a few years back when Jon Blow (Braid, The Witness) did a few talks about the fact that the biggest progress in recent years had been in hardware performance, making lazy software development standard since the hardware made it so easy to ignore any limitations.
I'm not as much of a fan these days but I do hope these limitations have the effect of improving best practices.
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#246Over investment in AI data centers is having a huge negative impact all over the economy. Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy. Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality. Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or n…
> I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest.
Such phone exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.
There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.
There is a lot of stuff you can get done with the standard library alone of various languages that play nice on all major platforms. People tend to reach for whatever stack of dependencies is popular at the time, however.
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#248The 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…
> The latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising. It's eyebrow raising for me in other ways. I have a Pixel 9a and it's been quite good with really solid battery life. It's barely 6 months old and I got it new straight from Google. A few days ago I noticed the battery started to drain much faster than usual. I also noticed at the same time Google is pushing the 10a. Nothing changed on my end. I barely use the pho…
I dont think Google is gimping your device to sell you new ones.
What you probably see is Google toggling on some new AI feature, which is now doing some initial on-device computation. It will usually calm down after a few days.
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS I think has really aggressive background task killing, and it also drives me insane. I know they do it for battery life but I'm about ready to switch to Android, and would have a long time ago if I that didn't also mean replacing my watch, headphones, etc. Is it too much to ask for me to manage my own background processes on my phone? I don't want the OS arbitrarily deciding what to pause & kill. If it actually d…
I recently started learning how to do iOS apps for work and the short answer is: you don't. Apple seemingly wants all apps to be static jpegs that never need to connect to any data local or remote, and never do any processing. If you want to do something in the background so that your user can multitask, too damn bad. You can run in the background, for a non-deterministic amount of time. If you do that, iOS nags your…
You don’t have to spend 5K, cmon.
Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
#250Maybe an upside? These past years it feels like meaningful hardware spec bumps are on the horizon, like in the 90s, 2010s. After all this churn subsides there is a chance entry level Windows laptops will start at 32GB RAM and maybe 8-12GB VRAM? Which could end up being about 5-10-15 years of progress packed into 2-3-4.
How do you figure? I'd think scarce and expensive RAM would push entry level models to smaller amounts of RAM.
Initially, yes.
But I'm betting on their shortsightedness, greed and general stupidity which will cause a crash. Leading to oversupply/huge leftover stocks.