It’s more likely they are not incentivized to. When you are writing software for a living, typically there days the companies you work for prioritize delivery speed over everything else. If they prioritized memory constraints, software would use less memory.
When you are rewarded for features and delivery, you end up with shit like electron. Not to even begin talking about how a whole generation of developers learned to code for the web and never touch os level dev…
Software has been running in the cloud for nearly 2 decades at this point. But yes, I get your point. Their master plan is to get us all on terminals and use their clouds as a giant mainframe more or less.
Doesn’t have to be that way though. Not all tech needs to be the latest and greatest. So long as it’s secure and is feature complete who cares how it looks.
Ironically, with LLMs at our disposal, making new software is easier than ever. In the hands of skilled engineers tasks that took weeks take days. It’s more realistic now for a single dev to sit down with a goal like “let’s remake X software, but a 10mb memory limit”. We can prototype this kind of stuff faster than ever, so we can use the very tools causing this problem to solve this problem.
16GB feels so low, but if we have to make due then the software we run needs to be crafted better. It’s entirely possible. Also ddr4 is plenty good. I wager no one can tell the difference between ddr5 and 4 or even 3 honestly
Quite frankly, we abuse ram anyways. So much software uses way more ram than is actually necessary. I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals. Doing far more with far less.
It’s the only thing we are empowered to do, buy less ram and use software that runs smoothly with less ram.
Agreed. Only way this happens is either open source, or new companies that recognize it as a competitive advantage. Get new users to favor your software, they grow up to get jobs and advocate for it there. It’s a gamble and a long game though