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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

#251

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 know this article is about RAM but I truly hate how little storage the iPhone ships with their phones. I guess everyone is using iCloud but I refuse to store my personal data on the cloud. I’m constantly down to 2-3 GB on my phone. I have just 128 GB of storage that’s not upgradable. What a shame.

My in-laws have probably discarded at least five or six Apple devices on that account. Typically they get used devices, with a good number of years of updates remaining, but the updates are pointless when iOS grabs 50% for it self and the actual update, resulting in a device that you may not be able to update even if you uninstalled everything.

The devices themselves are fast enough to run everything, you just can't update and eventually apps stop being available to the old iOS version they run.

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

#252
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In line with "the web was a mistake" I think the idea that you can create cross platform software is an equally big mistake. You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application. We see this on mobile…

I've only done one platform gui work (python) but I'd guess this is stuff that is ripe for transpiling since a lot of gui code is just reusing the same boilerplate everyone is using to get the same ui patters everyone is using. Like if I make something in tkinter seems like it should be pretty straightforward to write a tool that can translate all my function calls as I've structured them into a chunk of Swift that would draw the same size window same buttons etc.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel like that's definitely a choice for Facebook at least - there's no technical reason the app couldn't remember at least the post you were looking at. I think they literally don't care if you were halfway through reading something when you flicked out of the app and go back in - refreshing the page and showing you all new stuff is probably measurably "better for 'engagement'" by whatever silly metrics they use.

It’s been a while since I worked for a bigger company (not meta) but the problem there was you would have a team who was responsible for feature A and a team responsible for feature B, and if there was any weird interop between the two it just never got resolved because there wasn’t an owner. There was no internal incentive to fix the problem. It wasn’t deliberate but it was structural

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

#255
post #35

Wait until we find out that all of tech (ever) has been subsidized by the true-so-far assumption of continued growth, allowing today’s costs to be paid for by tomorrow’s larger market.

Are you talking about tech, pensions or credit?

Yarp.

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

#256
post #87

Over 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…

The deeper problem is that businesses are now expected to be funded by investors. There was a time when banks funded new businesses with loans, but now most of their lending is mortgages. Banks were better because they would lend to any business they thought wouldn't go bankrupt and weren't subject to FOMO and thinking only about future profits/exit, which they weren't entitled to.

Question is, is it really impossible for businesses to fund themselves with bank loans now? John Kay wrote about this years ago arguing the finance sector is no longer a good thing for society but has become more of a leech: taxing the money supply but not supporting new businesses. I feel like it's only become worse now. Even insurance is barely really insurance any more. It's more like a savings account that you might be able to withdraw from when you need it, but not necessarily.

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

#257

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 know this article is about RAM but I truly hate how little storage the iPhone ships with their phones. I guess everyone is using iCloud but I refuse to store my personal data on the cloud. I’m constantly down to 2-3 GB on my phone. I have just 128 GB of storage that’s not upgradable. What a shame.

Tin foil hat theory is icloud subscriptions is why image capture hasn't been updated in years and still crashes with big transfers. Not that I'd expect them messing with it at this point would generate a more useful tool.

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

#258
Well, maybe people stop changing their smartphone every two years. Or every year. Imagine the positive impact on the environment!

I am always surprised that when the planet caring, liberal Apple boss shows up on the Big Apple Event stage, he encourages people to ruin the planet by needles purchase of the new hardware, even though the old one can do the same job easily, as now the improvements are barely incremental, if any.

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

#259
post #244

Earlier 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.

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.

Pretty much any non-web GUI framework I tried so far has either been terrible to set up, or terrible to deploy. Or both. Electron is stupidly simple.

ImGUI is the single exception that has been simple to set up, trivial to deploy (there is nothing to deploy, including it is all that's needed), and nice to use.

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