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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago.

Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway.

For years, everyone kept saying it was fine that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?

Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!

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But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

>Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).

That is correct, DDR5 today is in real US$ slightly cheaper than DRAM was in 2011, 15 years ago.

For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today.

During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today.

Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse.

Nobody would like to use DDR3 right now though, you can get cheap DDR3 DDR2 if you want some

It physically will not fit a modern motherboard.

You can get an old mobo with an old CPU

Which will only support up to around 16-32GB anyways and most likely won’t be supported by Windows 11. You’re not really better off that way and I’m saying this as someone with a DDR3 setup in my closet and a ton of DDR/DDR2/DDR3 RAM sticks laying around.

We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10.

Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.

moder engineers.

The sad part is that we actually used to have better desktop RAD tooling than we do now. I’m thinking about Borland Delphi, C++ Builder, etc., it was pretty easy to make a decent desktop app.

I don't really understand the "its cheaper now than xyz years ago"

Sure, but we're being screwed regardless. You should be disappointed that almost 2 decades on, pricing hasn't improved. You should be disappointed the reason memory costs so much is because of AI contracts that you cannot compete with.

>Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?

At least anecdotally, I'm seeing more and more native apps being written. Sure most aren't first party products, sure some are AI generated but its better than having 11 electron apps on my computer running at the same time.

I want to upgrade to AM5 (thus DDR5). I currently have 64GB of RAM and most of the time in games (even "less demanding" games like CS2), I find my system using over 32GB of RAM. This is a Fedora system!

I think I could get away with 48GB, but 64GB is too far out of my price range.

15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.

Today 8GB is bare minimum.

Exactly, isn't that nuts? Especially when we're now paying 15-years-ago prices per gigabyte. What are we getting for that additional space?

The sad thing is that usability of computers has not improved. More RAM has bought us absolutely nothing when it comes to UI/UX.

You are destroying the subtle mechanism of corporate enrichment.

But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel.

True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.

No but it's the biggest one that's easy to forget.

Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric.

51% of people are still on 1080p according to the July 2026 steam survey.

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