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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free...

All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.

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>> it will be consumers demanding

But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.

>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs

I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:

When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.

When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.

I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.

If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.

That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.

"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."

The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.

I personally avoid Visual Studio Code as much as possible due to the scroll latency, so I think it is noticeable as long as you know what to look for.

As I've aged, my ability to see tiny text has diminished, but I can still see 60Hz vs 120Hz perfectly well.

> The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz

This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!

I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).

Zed is also at the bleeding edge of rust GUI development, which doesn't have the same mature libraries as other low-level languages. I'll give them the longer-term benefit of the doubt, but the attention to detail does matter.

To be fair, one could say the same for Zig, but Ghostty does extremely well in this regards. While it maybe doesn't have the same complexity that Zed does, it does have to deal with a lot of historical cruft of terminal emulation...

I have 3 different displays on my desk, and they are 60hz 120hz and 240hz.

The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.

Comparing side-by-side is always easier. The question is never that (should not be). The question is, would you approach a random coworker's desktop and really, sincerely, notice if they have a 120 vs a 144 Hz (or 240) monitor?

I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)

Most people can't perceive "micro stutters" and many who can don't care. It's a fairly niche feature requirement.

I really utterly despise this kind of exceptionalism.

You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.

What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.

Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.

Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.

Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that. I guess it would be less than $100 for the lifetime of their device.

This implies that a better version is on offer. It is not. You get the telemetry stuffed, stuttery garbage, and your company pays for it.

That wasn’t what I meant. I am saying that the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough. The average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care, so there’s no pressure to change.

I understand what you meant.

  > the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough

I wouldn't say that's THE reason, or even a contender. The average user has little agency over what the established tools are. There is no pressure to change the tools because there is no competition. You use what your employer dictates. office and/or gsuite.

Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.

  > average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care

this part is still true.

But this only explains why software used for work is like that. What about software people use privately and where they could chose a different one?

When you go buy a CPU you have twenty different points on the price versus performance curve to choose from, if not more. And they all have roughly the same feature list.

When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.

That would pay for so many millions of dollars of dev time. It would be a big win-win if you could organize that deal. In the tradeoff between more dev time and better hardware, typical consumer software is way too tilted toward the latter and wasting lots of money.

If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.

The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.

> Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that.

Clearly at least $100 (not adjusted for inflation) based on trends from 1990-2015.

Peoples primary reason for upgrading computer was better performance for years, after all.

Excel doesn’t have microstutters it has full blown stutters. It is ridiculous that it takes 3 seconds to open Save As on my Dell Workstation let alone yesterday when it took 30 seconds for a local server.

I'm so glad it's not just me. M1 MacBook Pro, here, and I quickly gave up on Zed because it felt so laggy to me. Thought it was something wrong with my MacBook (or maybe me).

This is very optimistic. I see a future where high hardware prices push more and more stuff to the cloud and consumer hardware becomes largely a thin client. Soon doing anything with a computer will require an internet connection because the "local" portion of software will be an electron UI that makes API calls to a server somewhere to do any "serious" work.

Don’t worry - the cycle will reverse again at some point and we’ll go back to more powerful local machines.

Why do you expect it would be cyclical when the power capture would be extremely valuable to the main players?

And those main players will just be outcompeted. I'm sure DEC wasn't anticipating the PC revolution to take hold so quickly.

I'm not sure they were quite as entrenched or quite as big as Apple or Google are today.

I have a T430 that came out 14 years ago that does "serious" work for me. For almost everyone the computers they use are wildly over speced for what they use it for.

My 2nd hand ~$200 (minus a 256gb SSD upgrade) T400 was the best laptop I've ever had. Comfy everything, best laptop keyboard I've ever had, not worrying about dropping it on concrete from 2 meters (on the big extended battery, no less). Coil whine when switching p-states, no IPS, that's about it.

Utilitarian laptops need to come back yesterday.

No not going back to a mainframe computing…

Yup. We're going back to time sharing for the majority of people. The terminal will be their dumb phone.

I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.

If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.

What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.

> If things don't work, they will blame the computer

Or the single app that slows it down.

Oh but I have seen totally tech uneducated people saying that they are tired of so many apps in their phones that slow things down. People do notice, and as soon as you start asking around groups who use mid- to lower tier level of Android devices, they do develop a diffuse intuition of what is and what isn't a "heavy" app. It is unavoidable, the cruft and bloat can be observed very visually in some apps that don't care about performance.

> I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.

I had a brand new experience today. I emailed someone explaining to "right-click, then…" and got a reply saying that they are left-handed, so my instructions were not applicable for them.

Average consumers, for the most part, have a magic box. Only when someone is motivated to learn, like wanting to have a better gaming experience or having an interest in media production (or code), is there incentive to learn.

There are a lot of things our devices could do to give users insight into basic things like which apps use a lot of resources, but they don't and it's a colossal failure for everyone (users, people who make efficient apps, pressure on people who make inefficient apps).

iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it.

Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them.

One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.

I keep Activity Monitor in my dock for this reason. You can right click its icon and change it to be a real-time graph of a few different stats. I have mine set to CPU usage, it’s like a one-metric iStat Menus for the Dock

One of the first things I got Claude/ChatGPT to vibe-code was a minimal iStats-Menus-like menubar app that shows total usage of CPU, RAM, and bandwidth all in a single small vertical stack at all times.

Then I can click it to open a dropdown that ranks the top 5 processes of each category (CPU, MEM, NET) and the amount they are consuming.

It's this kind of thing that should be built in to the OS. Makes it trivial to eyeball whether something unexpected is going on.

To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone, so they are rather surprisingly on the forefront of this efficiency in consumer-facing devices.

Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.

> To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone

Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling.

But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.

The Neo is absolutely Apple's best-selling Mac; they've been caught off-guard in an epic way.

(You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)

This pressure works for pure software companies that don’t depend on hardware sales and that have competition. Unfortunately not all software vendors will respond to inflated RAM and SSD prices, since there are many important software vendors who have a vested interest in having users upgrade their hardware frequently. Microsoft still makes a good deal of money on OEM Windows licenses, Apple’s App Store and services revenue is built on regular sales of Apple hardware, and Google benefits from the sale of Android devices. The software needs to perform well enough on new hardware to not cause bad reviews, but sluggish enough (or with enough missing features) to motivate users to upgrade their hardware.

Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.

The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.

> All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits!

They can't. They have no clue how. Electron is all they know and I doubt they can learn anything else.

Also AI clearly hasn't replaced developers since the AI companies are also using electron and generating very buggy software.

In many contexts, compute and memory can be traded. Some apps prefer higher memory usage over higher CPU usage, because it requires less power and depending on the configuration, is overall less slow when many apps are contending for the CPU.

It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.

RAM prices won’t stay like this forever. If demand keeps up, suppliers will just start producing more.

They're already producing as much as possible.

Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.

Suppliers have ceased to exist in the past decades for building up fabs to satisfy demand and by the time they went online prices cratered. I’d assume is even riskier and more expensive now.

Yes. Several new memory fabs are expected to come online in 2028, one in late 2027:

https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t...

So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.

(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)

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