Similarly with RAM. 8 GB sounds fine until you change jobs and have to use Slack. I'd argue that web developers are the drivers for more powerful hardware now. And with 5G, more and more people like to watch Netflix in decent quality on the go, so now you have to push more data through the network.
Also, out of all things to pick on about the economy, this is one of the least problematic. Personally, I think companies can and should shoot for triple digit megapixels on phones, terabyte of RAM and streaming 8k videos to contact lenses. These technologies are enablers - the more power and performance you make available, the more previously impossible use cases will show up.
That comparison is getting old these days. Slack takes ~60MB in my FF now. That's a rounding error even under 8GB.
(I honestly don't care much whether Slack has made performance improvements in the past few months, because I recently switched to the combination of not keeping it active in the browser, using the Android app, and using Ripcord client on desktop, which has sane system requirements.)
400MB for the standalone application last I checked, and that was after the newest upgrades that should make it better IIRC.
That is about 5% on a 8GB machine, and typically a much larger procent of the available RAM once you realize that a lot of those 8GBs are used by the OS and possibly other necessary processes.
EDIT: Thanks for the data points. It's better than I expected.
You obviously know this but for youngest people on HN: Back in the 90ies we could run Autocad on PCs with 512 MB.
It was slow but it was possible.
4G is fine for video, it’s really fast! Even 3G was quite fast with HSDPA and all that. What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
From what I understand, it's fine when it's just you doing it, but not when 20 other people standing next to you do it at the same time. 5G is supposed to improve on that.
> What I lack is cheap data on my phone otherwise I would watch Netflix on it right now.
That's, unfortunately, the problem with telco business shenanigans. Where I live, I managed to extend my contract from ~3GB to 22GB for something around $10-$15 monthly. I have plenty of LTE to burn on Netflix now.