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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I really need 8+ cores and 32G of RAM on a personal computer. I think there's some sort of max complexity ratio between the human mind and your equipment that, if you exceed it, means you'll never really know what's going on in there. I'd argue that 4 cores and 16G RAM already exceeds that threshold, by a lot.

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I thought the same thing, but between browsers, email apps like Outlook, Electron apps like Slack, a virtual machine or two...16GB isn't what it once was.

Just a suggestion, use Slack from a web browser instead. I usually pin frequently used websites like Gmail, Slack, etc. and turn on desktop notifications. So, there is no overhead of running a separate electron instance.

You don’t need to run all of those. Just stick Slack in a browser and use a native mail app.

20 years ago someone probably said the same thing about a machine so crappy you wouldn't consider using it for a second.

The primary change in complexity is in between 1 core and more than one core not a particular core count and we exceeded the ability of one operator to understand everything that is going on in there before you were born.

Using a slower machine with less ram and cores wont make it easier for you to understand it will just mean waiting longer for it to compile.

As an early and faithful Be user, I remember the odd looks I got when I chanted mantra “One processor per person is not enough!” back in the second half of the nineties. Oh, how times have changed!

You don't use a lot of Adobe apps, do you?

(Not trying to be snarky, but I spend a lot of time in my hobby using their apps and I could easily use 10x the overall processing power / speed)

I recently upgraded to an 8 core mbp with 32 gigs of ram. Makes for a much smoother system when I'm running a virtualized guest OS (I can give the virtual OS 8 gigs of ram and 2 dedicated cores) or both an android and ios emulator without any slowdown on my machine.

most people don't do anything that would warrant these specs though

Although things you can do doesn't actually change. I'd say the doubled cpu and memory improve the user experience as you no longer need to close program due to memory and cpu inefficient. You can just let them open and switch back as you want. Doesn't means anything for people doesn't use computer in this way though.

Your still burning significant CPU resources and turning that RAM on (rather than power gating it) to run Electron apps in the backgrohnd, hence why it tanks battery life on laptops.

that's not how memory works.

Depends on the OS.

I don't know if they ever went live with their tablet design but I recall reading LKML emails several years ago using / improving movable memory code so they could easily hibernate or drop chunks of RAM, so their tablet wouldn't have to maintain refresh on 8 GB of RAM when they only needed 1.

Most operating systems have chosen a different tradeoff, reducing fresh reads from persistent storage, keeping files cached in RAM, which may work out to equivalent power savings.

Any repetitive task you perform will be faster as long as network lag is not a factor.

This turns into productive time for you.

Agreed. I manage to get all my web development work done on a 2012 i5 8gb mac mini, which is duo core.

Same here - my mac air 11” from 2012 is more than sufficient to run my terminal windows into aws. I should get a new one but at this point, I feel like Kramer in that episode where he tried to see how far he could test drive a car after the empty light came on.

I would argue that software devs should be restricted to older equipment- I develop on an older ThinkPad with 8GB & dual core. I think the devs who manage to create things like Slack & the new Gmail interface should try using their products on something other than the newest gen hardware. I've noticed the same tendency myself--when I was developing on my (overpowered) desktop I didn't have to pay any attention to performance and the quality of my work suffered.

I've held the exact same belief, that all software (including OS!) should be developed on 5-10 year old hardware, not only so that it actually works on 5-10 year old hardware, but so that it works even better on the newer stuff.

That’s not exactly how it works. New CPUs and GPUs support new features that you could never test on old hardware: AVX, real-time raytracing, etc.

I disagree completely.

You could make the argument that devs should deploy their apps to older hardware. But develop on old hardware?

You clearly don't value developer time or the quality of life that heavier IDEs bring to the table.

Their network should be high latency too

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

There's a growing movement of people that believe all the power we put into computers goes to waste by adding layers of abstraction and I agree with them. VS Code currently sits at 550 Mb RAM idle. We could increase the performance and longevity of our hardware by fixing our software. The excess gain in performance could be used to do something useful instead of adding another VM on top of a VM inside a sandbox.

I completely agree with you. My Mac Plus from 1986 still feels snappier than a modern Mac in many ways despite having several orders of magnitude less storage, memory, and clock speed. That's because it was programmed close to the metal by excellent programmers. But you'll never get the Apple of today to build software that doesn't encourage people to upgrade their hardware.

AmigaOS and BeOS were other examples of this phenomenon. The world needs a new OS to show what really can be done on modern hardware.

Serious question. In what ways does your "Mac Plus from 1986 feel snappier than a modern Mac"?

Response time. The time between clicking the mouse and seeing a change on screen feels instantaneous; there's just no hesitation or lag for the most part. Compute-intensive tasks can't compete of course, but response time has gotten much worse in modern operating systems, especially mobile ones. It's quite common on a modern Mac for a scroll of a Finder window to put up a spinning beachball. Wristwatch cursors happened on classic Macs too, but never for something as trivial as a scroll. Part of the problem is that we're still using O[n] algorithms where n is a lot bigger than it used to be, but another part is that we no longer write UI code with an emphasis on quick response time.

the bar for being able to “really know what’s going on” was passed* in the late-90s, if not earlier.

* for any reasonable definition of “know” and “going on”

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