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Comment by jasonjmcghee | Hacker News Reader

Wow we're under $1/GB of RAM (in certain cases).

Hard to comprehend. I remember getting a 1GB hard drive and how crazy that was, and then much later when a mechanical drive was $1/GB.

Seeing RAM hit that is something else!

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Yet Apple dares to ship a laptop with 8gb ram that is not upgradable. RAM is dirt cheap but somehow the market abusers make it look like it's some expensive rare resource.

Even Thinkpads now solder ram to sell you a +16GB upgrade for 100usd (6usd per gb, double the market price).

The funniest thing about this is apple's engineer claiming 8gb on apple is equivalent to 16 on other systems.

They're basically openly calling their userbase idiots to increase the profit margin by 20usd on a 1,500++ usd device. Incredible how we got to this state where the RAM market quality in consumer devices is quickly degrading because of corporate greed not because of any market or technical challenge.

That was always true. Iphone with 128gb, Mac with 8gb ram, etc.

And MacOS in some cases says to user "fuck you! Next time buy apple device instead". Like to write to NTFS pendrive.

But then in many cases the solution is to open Unix terminal to do what you want.

> Iphone with 128gb

Is 128GB of disk in a phone too little?

Depends on usage.

My Galaxy Note 8 has a 400gb microsd card in it that's pretty full. Same for my android tablet.

Tablets without microsd and 3.5mm (such as the fancy and expensive but practically useless iPad I got as a gift) are abomination upon God and man, but I'm a grouchy old geezer so take that opinion with a grain of consumer salt :)

I have s22 128GB model and it certainly is too little.

I'm fully "in the cloud" and use google drive, photos and other sync extensively and recently I started to do more photography and videography completely casually (like while I'm on a hike) and the space limitation really shows to the point where I'm never buying a phone with <500GB. The space management is just so exhausting especially since everything is just so much bigger these days.

I don't understand how these "premium" devices ship with the least premium problem out there - moving files and saving space feels like such a cheap problem that you'd expect on 100usd android not on a flagship.

Right, I guess people are different in that regard. Don't have statistics but I don't know people to whom 128GB would be too little. Could be living in a bubble though.

> They're basically openly calling their userbase idiots

But their userbase keeps buying the higher-priced models. Wouldn't Apple be idiots, if they charged less than what the market will clearly bear?

Corporate greed is arguably a market challenge

But it's true, in fact it's an understatement: a 8gb mac makes you look way cooler than an 32gb pc.

Well yeah, because with only 8GB of RAM you have much more free time to practice looking cool while your machine grinds away in the trenches of swapistan

Maybe to the average consumer, but here it does not.

This happens to be very much the case in phones for both RAM and batteries. Although not by a factor of 2.

While not exactly true, it is a fact that Apple tries really hard to make the most out of a little memory while other systems (Windows, Android or Linux) piss away a lot of memory due to inefficiency, virtual machines etc and the only answer is 'just buy more RAM', which adds to cost, battery usage and is generally frowned upon as a solution to inefficient programming.

Do you have any real hard data that lets you to claim that macOS or iOS are more efficient than Linux or even Windows?

I think it comes down to a few design decisions like not standardizing on a VM based language with GC (like Java/.NET) which leads to more memory consumption. Only allowing a single browser engine will also keep memory usage lower on iOS. Apple was also early with a good memory compression implementation.

Of course, nothing will help you if you really want to run horrible applications, but at least the base system is optimized. You can run quite a lot of workloads even on an 8Gb Mac.

In my experience desktop linux is significantly lighter than macOS though

Depends on what desktop you use. A full Gnome or KDE desktop will eat a lot of memory.

Gnome uses 2GB at most when not memory-constrained.

I let you in on a secret: If you run a docker container on MacOS, you're running it in a VM. On Linux, you don't (at least not if you don't install the braindead Docker Desktop) https://docs.docker.com/desktop/faqs/linuxfaqs/#what-is-the-...

I have 32GB on my Linux desktop. On a normal day I use 6GB of memory.

Apple uses RAM and storage as price discrimination feature. And it also wants entry level machines so they can say “starting from …” It has nothing to do with the price of the memory itself. It is merely a factor that people are willing to pay for.

It's amazing what performance you can get by simply putting in as much RAM as your data needs - if plugging in a terabyte or two of RAM ensures that all your data is "in cache" on a single system (+ e.g. a mirror for redundancy) instead of having to constantly read from disk or do horizontal scaling, that's a relatively cheap way to get a simple&performant system.

One of the first people I know that "worked in computers" when I was a kid had a really fast 386 running Windows 3.0

I complained about how slow my 1 Meg 386 was and wanted a 486, he said he had 16 megs of ram (kind of insane at the time) and always said "the system will wait on you"

That was somewhat true until you went to load a new file or program that wasn't cached yet, or when a heavy re-draw occurred and a 4mb 486 would dust it. You just didn't page anymore, which happened a lot back then.

Actually, this is one of the easiest strategies to write slow software, because you're relying too much on the hardware to bail your poor decisions out. When running the software on worse hardware, you will see super linear slowdown.

This is from the perspective of designing a custom system for doing a particular business function, and its software and hardware are interlinked parts of the whole design (as would be e.g. a cloud platform if that was used for it), and it makes all sense of always considering them together as that enables valuable tradeoffs of one vs another instead of assuming that "this hardware must be powerful&efficient for any system" and "this software should run on any hardware". The software isn't intended to ever run on any other hardware, so in that context questions like "running the software on worse hardware" are meaningless as the software is not an isolated component meant to be deployed somewhere else on unknown hardware, it runs exactly on the hardware you want, and if you can save $5k of software costs by spending $1k of hardware costs then you should do it just as eagerly as if you could save $5k of hardware costs by spending $1k of software work. (Which is quite different from mass market software, where you have to consider small runtime savings multiplied by vary many different consumer devices running the same software)

But for many companies building such systems (custom line-of-business software is probably still the largest part of software development happening in the world) it's highly probable that if you can "bail your poor decisions out" by just buying RAM, that's is far more efficient than rebuilding parts of software - a saved man-month of engineering can buy a LOT of RAM; a terabyte of it is probably in the range where it's not even particularly worth trying to carefully evaluate the options as a well-staffed meeting or two discussing the possibilities can be more expensive than buying a few RAM sticks more.

This sounds straightforward but you're glossing over a lot of second order effects. Notably, if this idea dominates your attitude you'll be much more likely to miss the cases where a bit of judicious optimization actually would save substantially more in hardware costs. And it may not be 1k of hardware costs, but hundreds of k per year of cloud compute costs, depending on the situation.

I've been getting my hands dirty root causing a latency issue in another team's codebase at work. The program needs to run in real time, but the language is JIT compiled and garbage collected. In my most recent experiment, I successfully eliminated the most egregious spikes by completely turning off garbage collection during the latency sensitive phase. RAM usage creeped up to 50GB, but my workstation has 64GB so good enough? Also, I need to run the program 3-4 times to cache all the code paths, given that the program behavior is latency dependent. Just to make things extra spicy, the program seems to also spin off a rogue process that fills up my 1TB SSD and then die after a few hours.

If it’s easy/cheap to build 1-2 TB RAM systems, why are there so few I can rent from AWS?

I settled for 768GB when I tried a few months ago and it wasn’t cheap. They did have like one HANA class system that was multi-TB at even crazier prices but I was kind of disappointed when I went to do something like you suggest. It was also impossible to get a lot of RAM without overpaying for a lot of cores I didn’t need and couldn’t use.

I don’t disagree with your point about the optimization benefits of just caching data but actually getting a cache optimized system is seemingly another thing entirely. My perception is that it’s been hard to get >768 GB systems for a bunch of years now. But I don’t follow this space closely,

My dad paid ~$100 for 4 MB of RAM and that was more than his one weeks income.

Tech has gotten really cheap.

I remember flying to the UK for a holiday, and all I wanted there was a 512KB upgrade for my Amiga. Not a jersey, not a watch, just a RAM upgrade.

Kinda depressing to realize that I'm probably older than your dad because I remember paying about $560 for 16mb RAM in about 1995, and that was to upgrade the 2nd computer I owned. (I also remember about a year earlier, thinking $400 for a new 1.0gb hard drive was a great deal -- forget megabytes, we're in the future now, an entire GIGA-byte baby!!!)

Get off my lawn, kid! I paid $300 for 4MB of RAM in ~1993.

That's nothing. My company had to buy me a 4MB expansion card in the late 80s so I could run this new fangled OS called OS/2. It cost nearly $2000.

Hold my beer. The first PDP-11 computer our company bought, with 64kb RAM, cost 10 times my yearly salary.

I think the difference here is that the first few comments are referring to PCs, i.e. "Personal Computers". Everybody has a story of wildly expensive equipment that their employer purchased. Or worse, spending tens of millions on something like a data warehouse or ERP system and then limiting compensation for the individuals tasked with extracting value from those systems to $90-120,000. But now we're way off topic...

Of course room-sized computers from the days of NASA were incredibly expensive. I was just replying to a comment about 4MB of extra memory for a PC in the early days.

Someone tell Nvidia

(I know, I know, this isn't the fancy GDDR or HBM stuff.)

HBM is often, as I recall, $30/GB for comparison

I used to work for a guy in the 90s that sold Ram over the phone. He would get clients that needed to buy a bunch and broker deals with manufacturers. This was before internet pricing.

We would have a white board of all the different sticks and prices.

Was it these dudes? https://www.thebeliever.net/aristocrat-inc/ There were a lot of armed-robberies involving RAM and chip deals done over the phone back in the 90s.

No, we were small potatoes. Just local deals.

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