The problem is that higher performing devices will still exist. Those engineers will probably keep using performant devices and their managers will certainly keep buying them.
We'll probably end up in an even more bifurcated world where the well off have access to lot of great products and services that most of humanity is increasingly unable to access.
Have the laws of supply and demand been suspended? Capital is gonna pour into memory fabrication over the next year or two, and there will probably be a glut 2-3 years from now, followed by retrenchment and wails that innovation has come to a halt because demand has stalled.
We're not talking about growing tomatoes in your backyard.
Industrial production is no different, it just runs on different scales.
> Have the laws of supply and demand been suspended?
There is the law of uncertainty override it eg trade wars, tariffs , etc.
No 1 is going all in with new capacity.
If "performant" devices are not widespread then telemetry will reveal that the app is performing poorly for most users. If a new festure uses more memory and sugnificantly increases the crash rate, it will be disabled.
Apps are optimized for the install base, not for the engineer's own hardware.
What is the point of telemetry if your IDE launching in under 10s is considered the pinnacle of optimization?
That's like 100B+ instructions on a single core of your average superscalar CPU.
I can't wait for maps loading times being measured in percentage of trip time.
If your IDE isn’t launching instantly you have a bad IDE.
I guess so, but:
https://youtu.be/qqUgl6pFx8Q?si=x3CpsW9Aane7GHHV&t=1875
Because you don't want to regress any of the substeps of such a loading progress to turn it back into 10+ seconds of loading.
Can confirm, I'm currently requesting as much RAM as can fit in the chassis and permission to install an OS not too divorced from what we run in prod.
On the bright side, I'm not responsible for the UI abominations people seem to complain about WRT laptop specs.
How many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?
Some open source projects use Slack to communicate, which is a real ram hog. Github, especially for viewing large PR discussions, takes a huge amount of memory.
If someone with a low-memory laptop wants to get into coding, modern software-development-related services are incredible memory hogs.
IRC is far superior than Slack when it comes to RAM usage. Projects should just switch to that.
Or even Jabber/XMPP, which has video call and inline images support and it would run on machines a magnitude slower.
Image, video, and music editing. Developing, running, and debugging large applications.
The last three sounds to me like self-inflicted issues. If applications weren't so large, wouldn't less resources be needed?