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by musha68k·2y ago·view on hn ↗
Agreed, especially the increasing greediness with regards to RAM and corresponding upselling is unfortunately real at this point. I just upgraded to the iPhone 15 Pro Max because of the 8GB RAM and I will probably need to do so for my two Macs as well. 16GB/32GB RAM I “fear” not going to cut it in 2024 for my kind of snappy productivity work anymore. Especially due to unified memory architecture.

QED seemingly works out well for Apple though.. :P

I’m still hoping for some ex Apple folks to create some new version of NeXT computers. I would switch immediately to someone’s alternative offering trying to actually play at Apple’s level of quality.

1 comments
> I just upgraded to the iPhone 15 Pro Max because of the 8GB RAM

This is a bad reason to upgrade. If you were supposed to know about it, it'd be in the specs.

It's not there to improve performance or be more forward compatible, it's because the camera upgrades need it.

OOM kills are basically the sole reason for me to upgrade iPhones. Nothing more annoying than force-reloaded/lost state in/between apps while on-the-go and under tight time constraints. Also somewhat true: new lenses are amazing but “computational photography” defaults sometimes less compelling than my old iPhone X’s more “honest” output. I’m going to play around with RAW some more if I get the time for it though.
Just curious, I had a 2020 SE daily and never had a OOM, how do you do it?
How does software do this usually? :) I guess it’s a combination of heavy multitasking / using it for work + private plus - again - constant-drum of increasingly bloaty websites and applications following whatever the current ceiling is. “Simple” apps like podcatchers come to mind, don’t know how often Overcast bailed on me with maybe 100 podcasts subscribed / updating? But again there are many more cases and sometimes not only third party.
I still use a 2020SE and experience apps reloading all the time. I cannot keep more than 2 apps reliably in memory at any point. This includes Safari, youtube, reddit (honestly a poorly made app), spotify etc - fairly "common" ones.
Reddit is an especially appalling platform and the only thing more appalling than that is their doubling down on “app vs web” all the while having terrible UX and performance as you say. Something something about Conway’s Law I’m guessing :P
Yeah that's the actual truth, but Apple fanboys will tell you otherwise. Even though I use an iPhone/Apple Watch/Mac Mini I regularly have to explain to many of them what kind of nonsense Apple puts their user through considering the price they sell their devices. They always have some pretty dumb excuse, so sad it is really frustrating. And it's all in the name of margin. They put severe limitation in their already expensive base device for the sole purpose of maximizing margin and upselling. Because 100B of profit per year is not enough of course. If you look at it as a user, the massive profit they have been making did not translate to anything better, in fact quite the reverse. Personally, I'm out of there. They finally squeezed me out, I guess I'm a bad customer, I'm not willing to spend enough money. But fine so I am going to spend my cash elsewhere.

In defense of the poorly made apps, it just is a reflection of the general market. Mid-range Android phone have double the amount of RAM of entry level iPhone at half the price. The pressure to optimize is not very strong and I can't blame them. It's not worth spending hours of expensive engineering time on optimisation. It would still have limitations and at some point when you need more RAM to fit more data, you just need more RAM, you cannot "optimise" the problem away. All of this would be solved by more/bigger RAM chips that cost a dollar at worst. If Apple wasn't so greedy it would be a non-issue. So I think those developer have the right mindset, fuck Apple and if you are an Apple user either you spend more for the real deal or go look somewhere else for a more sensibly priced device.

Apps exiting in the background actually depends on storage size as well as RAM; there's a kind of swap for them but it has a daily disk writes budget.
Yeah I was never above ~180-200GB used storage on my 256GB iPhone X. I splurged on that one as usual.

Sorry ranting, not aimed at your comment at all just as I came back to this context: So I'm definitely a long standing and good customer (often and over many years an "evangelist" for free FWIW). IMO they have been milking us on the memory side of things for a while now though.

Even if I can gladly afford maxed out options I now increasingly do so because I feel "coerced" not because I just want the best. It's not great and gives a sour feeling for no good reason, I used to just love what they have on offer for the money spent. At this point they should just eat into their own margins and bump up to 50% more RAM across the board for most of the devices they are selling. That will not only make entry point customers more happy but also the ones buying their highest margin products. Why does the iPhone 15PM only have 8GB of RAM? I know that in no time my apps as a normal (?) multi tasker will get OOM killed again. The top of the line model just doesn't buy me much longevity in that department. The "toy" that is the Nintendo Switch had 4GB of RAM and came out the same year as my "premium" iPhone X at 3GB. Same kind of memory also IIRC. The next "toy" Switch 2 will apparently have 12GB when it arrives next year, I'm somewhat positive that Apple is already planning for their next PRO to have 10GB RAM max, maybe it will even stay at 8GB... the memory situation has really been ridiculous with them for a while.

Rant over, enjoy the sun :D probably / hopefully wrote this into /dev/null haha.