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Comment by nuancebydefault | Hacker News Reader

So the availability of cheap phones is going down because of the cost of RAM.

What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development phase. There's a lot of opportunity. We can even leverage AI these days to optimize existing software for RAM usage.

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Unless you can use apps created 10 years ago the is no sense to produce phones with old specs.

Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway

> No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine

My personal laptop is a ULV 6th gen i5 with 8GB of RAM. Gets the job done, slowly but usably. That's about 9 years old. It runs Ubuntu. A dozen or so Firefox tabs, Kicad, VS Code, Slack. Computer things.

I'm of the opinion that application developers should be given middle-tier consumer systems as work machines. The whole notion of "dogfooding" is "dog-something else" if your devs experience the product using different hardware from the customer.

My initial reaction was that old compute levels are probably good enough for modern applications, but after thinking through all of the common use cases you’re probably right.

I think it’s AV that makes the difference. The modern smartphone does a ton of processing on the image sensor, and the modern laptop is expected to output multiple 4k video signals (zoom camera + desktop sharing) while accepting multiple video signals, without dropping below 120hz.

I think the reasoning is incomplete.

RAM isn't the only reason to upgrade. CPU's are more efficient, screens are significantly better and support variable-refresh-rates (and high refresh rates), battery technology has not stood still: even if they didn't degrade over 10 years.

There's plenty of reasons to upgrade to a new system even if it has the same memory capacity on paper. The memory will probably be faster and lower voltage too.

RAM usage doesn't just depend on the software that comes with the phone but also (or even more so) on the apps the user installs and on the content - so this is something that would need an ecosystem-wide adaption not just a single vendor.

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