Ram is cheap. Usage at this scale just doesn't matter to the vast majority of users.
“It only uses 8% of 8GB of RAM. If that’s an issue consumers can buy more RAM or throw away their devices and buy new ones” is soon phrased as “It only uses 8% of 16GB of RAM. If that’s an issue consumers can buy more RAM or throw away their devices and buy new ones” and soon after etc, etc
At some point, preferably before we start saying “it’s just half a terabyte of RAM to run a chat app”, we may want to step back and question this circular justification for ever increasing bloat and ask ourselves when enough is enough. There’s been no real gain in functionality in the past 10-20 years of chat app churn, just an enormous explosion in RAM and CPU requirements.
Perhaps you aren't giving credit to functionality that is important to people other than yourself?
The main, really only, features that Slack has that IRC doesn’t is easy account onboarding and (crucially, for business) offboarding, and persistent messaging. This has been discussed to death, publicly, by organizations like Mozilla. They were also smart enough to offer themselves for free to startups, which largely undermined hipchat, which had the same basic value proposition over IRC, and allowed them to build a hip reputation and network effects in the startup crowd.
Are we really going to pretend that those features are why the Slack client consumes tons of RAM and a fuckload of CPU cycles? They’re entirely server side, for christ’s sake.
ICQ could do all of the above on a 32 Meg Mac 20 years ago. The bloat isn’t related to the reasons it “won”, or why it continues to be popular. Network effects, the fact that if your company mandates it you have no alternative, simply insulates them from suffering many ill-effects of their bloated, laggy client software.
But sure, ok, so let’s hear your theory on why they got big and how it requires all of this client side RAM usage. So what is it?
Mostly what drove orgs I’ve been with from one to another has been pricing (Slack having a free tier ate Hipchat’s lunch, like I said), and “buzz”. Slack was the hip thing to get on in 2013.
Obviously no PM is going to tell customers, "just spend $200 for another 8GB of RAM to run our chat software."
> Usage at this scale just doesn't matter to the vast majority of users.
The usage model is that it's on all the time. So if it's draining batteries, causing paging or otherwise slowing things down, people are going to quit Slack, thus defeating the immediacy of communication, thus defeating the point of running Slack.
And Slack becomes powerful when it can be required by a workplace, which is their business model. This means the "vast majority" isn't enough at any given company.
And no, not even with 16GB will I tolerate what slack uses even with their new version.
Yes, I do consider upgrading the ram myself by replacing the soldered ram-chips. And do not for a second imagine I'm doing that so that I can send text messages@!
Lot's more options in PCs obviously, but 2 minutes of googling found a 16GB XPS13 $580 more than the 8GB version. Again, not $1000. I'm sure with slightly more searching there are cheaper options as well.
For reference I bought 64GB for my workstation for less than $400 a few years ago. And that's with 25% sales tax.
Desktop memory is cheaper, laptop manufacturers are rent seeking with upgrades normally, and with soldered memory they have free reign.
It’s true that often the upgrades are bundled, ie; can’t get 16GiB without an i7. But I think that’s fairly rare at least.
As for 16GiB, there’s a hard limit there for LPDDR3, and intel CPUs do not support LPDDR4 yet.
Oh, and another thing regarding cost, there were some issues a long time ago with the factories producing them, which is why the price is still high, maybe artificially.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnxb35/the-year-that-the-...
Well, the biggest point of soldered ram has always been to be able to recoup costs by denying people to buy ram from someone else.
Even in the old days it was much cheaper to buy 2 GB of ram and then upgrade to 4 GB than buying it with 4 GB in the first place.
RAM is cheap...and not upgradeable on the majority of devices in the world.