I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.
Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.
For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:
1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020
1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).
MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
> I disagree, and I always upgrade the RAM even though I don’t like paying more. Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.
Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance?
> In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound.
We already live in that world. In the 90s you could run Netscape Navigator on a machine with 8 megabytes of memory. I've seen individual browser tabs use more gigabytes than that.
And not all of this is Electron bloat. The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB. In general the quality is going to be proportional to the model size. So for the thing to get better, people need machines with more memory. And 8GB is already too small.
Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance?
I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing.
The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB
That's not a baseline consumer application. See my other reply (re: grandma and little Billy). If you're developing a native Mac app for grandma and little Billy, Apple probably doesn't want you shipping a 13GB model with it. This is an example of the point I'm trying to make: find a way to compress the model so the end user doesn't have to deal with that kind of bloat (or host it in the cloud).
> I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing.
You expect every developer to buy a second Mac? They're all doing what you're doing and paying more for the machine with more memory because other applications need it, and then their application runs fine on that machine so they don't even notice the problem for the people with 8GB.
> That's not a baseline consumer application.
It will be before any of these new machines go out of support.
It's very easy to check the memory usage of your project (it's kinda in your face on XCode). If you do a few minutes test or let the app stay open for a few hours and usage has ballooned to a few GBs, that usually means you have a leak somewhere to fix.
And is there any wonder Electron has such a terrible reputation?
The thing that really bothers me is that if you look at what regular home and office users were doing on their computers in the 90's it's almost identical to what those users are doing right now, except in the 90's they had orders of magnitude slower computers with orders of magnitude less memory. Yet in many cases those 90's computers were MORE RESPONSIVE than what they have today.
All of those countless billions of investment in technology hasn't done a damn thing for the productivity of Sally the office worker or Billy the 6th grader. Arguably, it's made their lives worse (viz. social media's deleterious effects on mental health). Now everyone's pushing the heck out of AI and all I see is high schoolers using ChatGPT to cheat themselves out of an education. They can't read (critically), they can't write, they can't even spell!
So in light of all that, why should we be pushing more and more computing power (and memory, the original issue) on regular users who aren't getting any benefit (broadly, to their way of life) out of it?
> And is there any wonder Electron has such a terrible reputation?
Certainly not, but you can't fix it by putting less RAM in the machines of people with budget constraints. The developers will just pay for more themselves and then not care about those people because people who can't afford RAM generally aren't lucrative customers.
And it's also worth considering what actually causes this.
Developers want their code to work on every platform. They don't want to write different code for each platform. But each platform wants them to have to, because that makes it more likely there will be software that only works on their platform, or that doesn't work on some new competing platform. So they refuse to develop or implement cross-platform standards.
Then someone else has to do it, but that's rather a lot of work, and it turns out the easiest way to do it is to piggyback on the work already done for browsers to make them work on every platform. That's Electron. It's terribly inefficient but it saves the developer a lot of porting work, so it's widely used.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.
If Apple doesn't like this, they should provide cross-platform native APIs for developing applications.
It’s not in Apple’s interest to do that. It would cost a lot of money to develop and only benefit the competition. It would also slow down Apple’s own ability to innovate on the APIs until the competitors catch up.
Or are you saying Apple should develop the APIs for Windows and Linux as well? Why would they do that?
There’s a lot of profiling tools. There’s even one in the browser’s inspector. It’s not something exclusive to XCode. You can even use Task Manager/Activity Monitor/System Monitor in a pinch.
RAM usage has barely budged for years. Taking the '90s as baseline again: In 1991, you could get a brand new PowerBook 100 with 2 MB of RAM. In 2001, you'd get a new PowerBook G4 with 128 MB of RAM, a 64-fold increase. But in 2013, a MacBook Air came standard with 4GB, and we're looking at only 8GB in 2024.
You're taking as your example the thing people are complaining about. 8GB of DDR5 is ~$24 retail, and that's the amount Apple is putting in their $1000 laptop. PCs of the same price typically have 32-64GB.
You're also using a time period that includes COVID and when the DRAM manufacturers got busted for price fixing.
It kind of is, e.g. Steam hardware survey has more than 80% of people with at least 16GB of RAM and almost a third with 32GB, and that's a measure of installed base rather than new computers.
In the second case it started only 3 years into your measurement period instead of 7, and then right after that was COVID. It's only now that the prices are starting to resume their historical downward trend and they're still slightly above where they were when the price fixing started in 2016.
But that explains why it's not a factor of 64 during this period. It's still the case that 8GB of DDR5 is ~$24. What reason is there to not include $100 worth on a $1000 machine? Or, if some excuse for that could be generated, why isn't there a $1100 machine with four times as much?
> But in 2013, a MacBook Air came standard with 4GB, and we're looking at only 8GB in 2024.
You're saying "RAM usage", but your evidence is "RAM provisioning", which is the entire basis for the criticism. The reality is that RAM usage has increased significantly, but Apple has been stuck by the addressable memory limits they've baked into their architecture.
As another point of comparison, a 2013 iPhone 5c (technically not released until the last quarter of 2013, but we're being generous here) had 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, though you could upgrade that to 32GB. A modern iPhone has 6GB of RAM, and comes with storage from 128GB to 1TB.
>As another point of comparison, a 2013 iPhone 5c (technically not released until the last quarter of 2013, but we're being generous here) had 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, though you could upgrade that to 32GB. A modern iPhone has 6GB of RAM
Fine, take that as your reference. It still shows that growth in memory was 1000% faster not too long ago.
No, it doesn't. It shows that Apple's RAM offerings have grown at widely different rates depending on their product. Apple has been stingy on memory compared to the broader industry. The biggest EC2 instance you could get in 2013 had 244GB of memory, but today you can get one with over 24TB of memory.
...and that still proves nothing about the growth of RAM usage in that time period, because the size of the offerings in individual products are largely independent of the increases in RAM usage.
> Why? Because it puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control.
I've yet to notice the impact on getting web sites to stop using incredibly bloated JavaScript that leak memory, video conferencing & streaming apps from using codecs that redline the CPU, or game developers from writing games that make the GPU cry uncle, or...
> 1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020.
You got lucky, because we got the Mac II Si back then, but they were both kneecapped on the factory floor by the 16-bit memory bus that crippled the 68020's 32-bit memory bus. 2 year old PCs ran circles around it. Planned obsolescence was was one of Apple's crowning achievements back then.
> 1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
The Macbook Air from ten years ago would be Retina I had: a 2-core i7 that could go up to 3.5 GHz. Ask me how well that runs software written for the new M3's. ;-)
> MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
You might have missed this bit from Apple's blurb on the new MacBook Airs: "13x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air". The fastest Intel-based Macbook Air was produced [checks notes], 4 years ago. It's hard not to read that like they aren't trying to convey a need to upgrade.
If you're wondering why people are saying what they're saying, it's because Apple is saying what they're saying.
> It puts pressure on developers to keep the bloat under control
If you are talking about "native" apps, maybe. Otherwise, nah. Cross-platform apps based on web like Teams and Spotify won't put too much effort on performance as long as it is not too slow. And if you haven't realized, most of the stuff you interact with is online. People just shove an entire website.
As for professional apps -- if you can't run a heavy audio/video editing application smoothly, I'm pretty sure that's your problem. Developers can put more effort into optimizing for 8GB RAM, but at the end of the day these workflows require large amount of memory, and after a certain point it is not worth to optimize for this segment of users
I'm talking specifically about native, non-professional apps targeted at regular consumers (such as grandma, aunt Suzie, little Billy working on his science project). These are the kinds of apps that are published on the Mac App Store. Apple specifically includes Performance as a section under its App Store review guidelines. I bet if you submit an app that gobbles up more than 8GB of RAM and starts swapping like crazy on a baseline Mac, you'll get rejected by the review team.
Seriously? A 9 year gap and you go from that to not wanting users to feel like they need to upgrade every year? Mighty slippery straws you're grasping there.
Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.
For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:
1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020
1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).
MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).