this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
98 points (88.3% liked)

Technology

69770 readers
4526 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
98
I can't pay rent because devs just don't care (happyfellow.bearblog.dev)
submitted 1 week ago by jandoenermann to c/technology@lemmy.world
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Also the only time I've heard "memory is cheap" used IRL was in backend development. Because it's cheap to scale up memory on your servers, but not cheap to spend a day or 2 hyperoptimizing a solution that's fast enough. Dev time is expensive.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Or for workstations. It's a lot cheaper to add a stick of RAM to a workstation than optimize workflow a bit.

There are many cases where RAM is not cheap:

  • mobile apps
  • end user machines - most people won't add that stick of RAM
  • macOS apps - pretty much all Apple products use soldered RAM now

If you control the machine, RAM is cheap, until it isn't. If you don't control the machine, you should always keep an eye on RAM, because once the complaints start coming in, you've already started losing customers.

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

MacOS has weirdly fast paging and shit, you don't feel the lack of RAM immediately. But in the long run it'll kill your (also soldered) SSD so that's even worse for heavy users.

I think phone apps have more to play with as well nowadays. A Galaxy A55 can have 12 gigs of RAM now. That used to be considered overkill for even flagships, let alone midrange phones, just a few years ago. Plus both operating systems will suspend apps running in the background when needed.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

My phone is pretty recent and has 8GB RAM, and it's still fairly common to find phones with 4GB RAM. You really can't rely on a consistent amount of RAM, so being careful with memory is still important.