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

321–330 of 341 posts

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

#321

Post by Matumio »

coatmatter wrote: post #316
meerita wrote: post #22

If the memory shortage is real and sustained, I wonder whether we’ll see a secondary effect in the resale market.

One of my trend-following and easily-influenced sisters was quite locked into the Apple ecosystem (iPhones, MacBooks) with her young family, but just over Christmas last year, I spotted them with a refurbished ThinkPad (T490 or thereabouts), with a plan to buy another refurbished ThinkPad. I /hope/ to see the slowdown in the new phones market affecting the pumped-up chatbot market. To reference Agent Smith, what good…

AGENT SMITH: And tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is DRAM if you are unable to boot?

The question unnerves Neo and suddenly he feels his phone vibrate as it unexpectedly reboots. The standing Agents snicker.

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

#322

Post by 0dayz »

m-schuetz wrote: post #216
mikestorrent wrote: post #178

Earlier 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.

I feel that flutter is the first right step for this, it felt like a breath of fresh air to work with compared to the webstack.

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

#323

Post by adithyassekhar »

expedition32 wrote: post #104
jama211 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very specific complaint that has nothing to do with the amount of ram you have, that’s a software choice in iOS. Kinda a tangent for a top comment.

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 because of a lack of centralized push message service. Here we have google cloud messaging to handle notifications for all apps. They don't have google in china, so each app establishes it's own connection to it's servers and that kills the battery. If you buy the global version of those phones it's often better.

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

#324

Post by adithyassekhar »

ranguna wrote: post #290
asdff wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for fortnite players. If you just call/text/email whats the point in upgrading? At this point I pretty much just ride out whatever iphone se I happen upon on deep discount until Apple finally walls me off from the OS version I need to access my bank account (thanks to very helpful flow of bank website forcing app store redirect to their app for mobile users). Then it's on to the next se. Now that I think on it…

Strange comparison. If you just call, text and check on bank apps, then the market is not for you. Just buy a used phone from 10 years ago. It's like saying why should you get a new gaming laptop to replace your 6 year old current gaming laptop, when all you do is office work. If all you do is office work, why buy a gaming laptop at all? Just use a standard okish smartphone or tablet.

Strange attack on a very valid point. An extremely small segment goes outside the regular phone/social media/video space that actually uses these faster chips. For others the experience haven't gotten better relative to the faster hardware. Where are those cycles going?

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

#325

Post by arexxbifs »

dvdkon wrote: post #242
arexxbifs wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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()` a…

> Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps

Yes, they were comfortable and easy to set up (and use), particularly when compared to web development.

> a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`

This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time, _especially_ when it started replacing RAD tools like VB and Delphi. In fact, it still looks like this in many ways, except now you have a JSX property and React state for disabling the button, and a mess of complex tooling, setup and node modules just to get to that base level.

The web won not because of programmer convenience, but because it offered ease of distribution. Turns out everything else was secondary.

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

#326

Post by dizhn »

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…

Chinese retro handheld companies started to quietly remove specific information about RAM speed etc. You can even get different hardware per batch.

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

#327

Post by laughing_man »

mrweasel wrote: post #239
dsego wrote: 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…

>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.

Or you can use a VM, which is essentially what a modern browser is anyway. I wrote and maintained a Java app for many years with seamless cross platform development. The browser is the right architecture. It's the implementation that's painful, mostly for historical reasons.

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

#328

Post by okanat »

qsera wrote: post #282
okanat wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross platform GUI libraries suck. Ever used a GTK app under Windows? It looks terrible, renders terrible, doesn't support HiDPI. Qt Widgets still have weird bugs when you connect or disconnect displays it rerenders UIs twice the size. None of those kinds of bugs exist for apps written in Microsoft's UI frameworks and browsers. The problem with cross platform UI is that it is antithetical to the purpose of an OS-nati…

> Ever used a GTK app under Windows? I have created and used them. They didn't look terrible on windows. >What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web.. I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too.. I think it is just there th…

Here is Bleachbit, a GTK3-based disk cleanup utility. It is a blurry mess and GTK3 Window headers are completely out of style and behavior with Windows.

https://imgur.com/a/ruTGUaF#ntnfeCJ

https://imgur.com/yGhgkz2 -> Comparison with another open source app Notepad3 under Windows.

> I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too..

The problem is they half-ass it. Qt only does it with QML. Qt Widgets is half-half and it is a mess.

Overall these do not invalidate my point though. If you want a truly cross-platform application GUI, you need to rewrite the GUI for each OS. Or you give up and write one GUI that's running on its own platform.

> I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...

Indeed, Google employs some of the smartest software developers and ones with really niche skills like Behdad Esfahbod who created the best or the second best font rendering library out there. However, Qt has a company behind (a very very incompetent one, not just the library but operating a business). I have seen many commercial libraries too, they are all various shades of terrible.

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

#329

Post by qsera »

okanat wrote: post #328
qsera wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever used a GTK app under Windows? I have created and used them. They didn't look terrible on windows. >What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web.. I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too.. I think it is just there th…

Here is Bleachbit, a GTK3-based disk cleanup utility. It is a blurry mess and GTK3 Window headers are completely out of style and behavior with Windows. https://imgur.com/a/ruTGUaF#ntnfeCJ https://imgur.com/yGhgkz2 -> Comparison with another open source app Notepad3 under Windows. > I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too.. The problem is they half-ass it. Qt only does it with QML. Qt Widg…

I see your point. Thanks for the screenshots.

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

#330

Post by dvdkon »

arexxbifs wrote: post #325
dvdkon wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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()` a…

> Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps Yes, they were comfortable and easy to set up (and use), particularly when compared to web development. > a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False` This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time, _especially_ when it started replac…

> This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time

React is over a decade old, and as far as I remember, desktop apps using embedded browsers (Electron) started becoming dominant after it came out.

The ease-of-distribution advantage is huge, but web technologies are big outside the Web too, where it doesn't apply.

(Besides my main point, idiomatic web UIs don't implement resize handlers for positioning each element manually, but instead use CSS to declaratively create layouts. Modern GUI libraries with visual builders can also do this, but it was decidedly not the norm in the 90s. Also, modern dynamic GUIs generally don't use a static layout with disabled parts, but hide or add parts outright. That kind of dynamicity is hard to even conceptualise with a GUI builder.)

Post reply on HN