It's really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.

I was trying to upload a 300mb video via the local police's web interface, a very important matter. I had to set my phone screen to stay on for 30 minutes and then leave the web browser open without touching it. Disabling all power saving measures makes not difference. This was the only way I could get it to finish uploading. I'm on a pixel 8 pro with grapheneos. Same thing in both Firefox and vanadium. I don't think it runs out of ram, the system is just too trigger happy. The battery still doesn't last all day anyway.

> A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the problem.

Considering how many people are so averse to programming that they use LLMs to generate code for them? Not very likely IMO. I would like to see it happen, but people seem allergic to actually trying to be good at the craft these days.

I feel like my 3GS was way better about resuming where I left off than any fancy new iPhone I’ve had in the past few years.

Big name apps like Facebook, YouTube, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts seem totally disinterred in preserving my place.

YouTube being the worst where I often stack a bunch of videos in queue, pause to do something else for a while and when I return to the app the queue has been purged.

Very specific complaint that has nothing to do with the amount of ram you have, that’s a software choice in iOS. Kinda a tangent for a top comment.

I really dont understand that at all. Web Pages are mostly static, you would think the iPhone would cache websites reasonably well.

I remember on Android I dont recall the app name specifically, but it would let me download any website for offline browsing or something, would use it when I knew I might have no internet like a cruise.

Heck there used to be an iOS client for HN that was defunct after some time, but it would let you cache comments and articles for offline reading.

iOS I think has really aggressive background task killing, and it also drives me insane. I know they do it for battery life but I'm about ready to switch to Android, and would have a long time ago if I that didn't also mean replacing my watch, headphones, etc.

Is it too much to ask for me to manage my own background processes on my phone? I don't want the OS arbitrarily deciding what to pause & kill. If it actually does OOM, give me a dialog like macOS and ask me what to kill. Then again, if a phone is going OOM with 12GB of RAM there's a serious optimization problem going on with mobile apps.

I am on my $110 android device from 2022 (4GB RAM), and I have never faced the browsing related issues that you mentioned. My phone came with stock android 11 ROM with no bloats, so that might've helped too I guess.

It’s not just mobile safari, safari on desktop does the same thing even with lots of memory available. Whatever they’re doing to limit a tabs resources needs to go, it’s so frustrating.

IOS or safari issue then, I also have 12GB ram on my S25+, with 25 open tabs, and I quickly did a test, there was non that were un-loaded that I had to reload

It happened a lot on my previous phone with only 4GB ram though

Settings > Apps > Safari > Reading List: Automatically Save Offline

“Save webpages to read later in Safari on iPhone” https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/save-pages-to-a-readi...

It’s more likely related to choices involving making the battery last long.

Wasn't the 2DS just a 3DS minus the lenticular screen, and especially minus the front-facing camera that did face tracking to improve the quality of the 3D?

My understanding was that market research showed a lot of users were turning off the 3D stuff anyway, so it seemed reasonable to offer a model at lower cost without the associated hardware.

Android Firefox with ad blockers - life changing.

Memory uses power, this is a major factor in why aggressively stopping things helps.

There is a strong argument modern mobile goes too far for this.

That is an Apple problem and keep in mind that iPhone doesn't do multi-task, the fact that you are having problems with 12GB is not surprised to me.

I have to use a Macbook M4 at work with 24GB, I have an AMD Lenovo Ryzen7 with 32GB running Linux Mint Cinnamon. It is infuriating how slow this Macbook is, even to shut it down is slow asf.

macOS is not different than Windows, I cannot wait for COB to get back to my Linux laptop.

Am I too much of an idealist to hope that AI leads to less buggy software? On the one hand, it should reduce the time of development; on the other hand, I'm worried devs will just let the agents run free w/o proper design specs.

> and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!).

Spotted the German lol

The general problem is that many people don't bother testing their apps outside of their office wifi with low latency, low jitter, low packet loss and high bandwidth. Something like persisting the state when the OOM/battery-save killer comes knocking onto some cloud endpoint? Perfectly fine on wifi... but on a mobile connection that might just be EDGE, cut entirely because the user is just getting a phone call and the carrier does not do VoLTE, or be of an absurd latency? Whoops. Process killer knocks a -9 and that's it, state be gone.

Side note: Anyone know of a way to prevent the iPhone hotspot from disassociating with a MacBook when the phone loses network connectivity? It's darn annoying, I counted having to reconnect twenty times on a train ride less than an hour.

but think of all your battery life gains

Removing docking functionality could possibly reduce RAM usage by never enabling 4K screen output. This would be similar to the switch lite.

Although, for a $450 device that doesn’t need to make much of a profit on its own, I also don’t think they’re heavy on memory in the first place (12GB). You can buy top quality Chinese Android handhelds with more RAM and better Qualcomm processors than the Switch 2 for about the same price, and those companies are making $0 in software royalties (e.g., AYN Thor Max is $450 with a 16GB/1TB configuration).

I honestly think the memory shortage kills the possibility of a Switch 2 Lite.

Nintendo can't realistically take memory budget away from developers after the fact. The 2DS cut the 3D feature from the 3DS, but all games were required to be playable in 2D from day 1, so no existing games broke on the cost-reduced 2DS.

> The latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising.

It's eyebrow raising for me in other ways.

I have a Pixel 9a and it's been quite good with really solid battery life. It's barely 6 months old and I got it new straight from Google.

A few days ago I noticed the battery started to drain much faster than usual. I also noticed at the same time Google is pushing the 10a.

Nothing changed on my end. I barely use the phone in my day to day. In 10 hours today I sent 3 text messages with Whatsapp and lost 60% of my battery in that time frame. Up until a few days ago, 60% would last me 3 days.

I find it weirdly coincidental that the battery life went from amazing to worse than a 5 year old device I had prior to this just as they are releasing new phones. I've powered it down and given it a full discharge / charge too. It's still draining at an alarming rate.

The only reason I changed my phone was because my provider stopped supporting it when migrating to 5g VoIP.

Otherwise I'd still be rocking my S9.

I'm also using a pixel 2 for Android development and Google play billing isn't supported on it.

The hardware is fine but they make it obsolete with software.

I'm guessing they'll soon move to a subscription pricing for phones.

Upcoming Apple display mounted to wall or robot arm is rumored to have audio interface and new OS without 3rd-party apps, only "AI".

Jony Ive at OpenAI is rumored to have smart speaker, pendant, pen and bone-conducting headset in the launch pipeline. Audio interfaces, no screens,

Meta is selling millions of smart glasses, with Apple and others following.

If the memory market was not distorted, home AI + agents + open models could have a bigger role via AMD Strix Halo. Instead, they will be reserved for those who can afford to spend five figures on 512GB or 1TB unified memory on Mac Studio Ultra devices.

OSes have been in decline for a long time. This memory price is just a blip, though. These supply and demand shocks happen periodically and always return to normal.

> Coupled with the current iOS situation it seems like things are… rotting. Everything in decline.

Just "commoditizing". Last years microwave ovens were basically the same as 2024's also, and no one cares. You still need them and people still buy them and use them as much as ever, but at a replacement rate and not because of fashion or innovation.

That is a good thing. It means the economy is doing what it's supposed to do and bringing maximal value to consumers so we can spend our resources more efficiently (on other fashion-driven junk in different market segments), making us richer.

It's only bad news if your business is selling "phones" and not innovative products more generally. Which, yeah, is pretty much AAPL's trap. But that's on them, not us. We're winning.

Don't worry, I'm sure the billions of dollars being spent on AI slop will restore consumer enthusiasm any day now...

You’re asking why a market that has had 3 price fixing lawsuits in less than 2 decades (criminal convictions in 1998, civil in 2006 and 2018) isn’t going to follow market dynamics?

One reason we end up with excess capacity is process improvements; adding new fabs to get more density or performance doesn't make old fabs go away, and so we go through cycles of excess capacity. Demand has been relatively constant.

Here we're facing different forces-- unprecedented demand for DRAM that may be durable. But it also looks like the pace of supply changes may be decreased as process improvements get smaller and the industry stops moving so much in lockstep.

It still matters what happens to the demand function, though. If enough AI startups blow up that there's a lot of secondhand SDRAM in the market, and demand for new SDRAM is impacted, too, that will push things down.

Sort of like what happened with the glut of telecom equipment after

> The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again

Sure thing. I'd take a look at IDC & similar firms' forecasting history before worrying too much about what they say.

There is an AI boom right now. There will be a consolidation cycle at some point. When that happens half the players, if not more, will disappear. The huge hardware budgets will go with them.

We also can't be certain that the DRAM makers aren't capitalizing on this opportunity because they can. Remember: all of them are convicted monopolists. As in actual prison time convicted. And fined. And lost civil lawsuits. Multiple times.

I just can't see AI paying enough of a premium on HBM to justify the DRAM spikes. Frankly I can't see the volume either. Wafer starts on DRAM are dramatically bigger than you are probably imagining. DRAM is in practically everything these days. AI servers is but a drop in the bucket. 10% of the market? Yeah right, if its 4% I'd be shocked. And you are telling me a shift of 4% of wafers to HBM is driving these prices and shortages?

I humbly suggest if you look at the numbers something smells funny.

Disclaimer: none of us has access to the actual data, a lot of it is inferred by industry players. Some are well connected and usually accurate but that is not evidence. Therefore it is possible this is a genuine market action and nothing nefarious is going on.

> Why is that not going to happen next time?

Because this shortage isn't natural, it's the result of OpenAI flexing monopsony power to deprive everyone else for its strategic gain. Unlike an organic shortage, there is no compelling reason for otherwise excess capacity to be built, since this artificial shortage can end as arbitrarily as it started.

We don’t know when the PS6 is going to be released, as of now that is just a rumor.

> Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.

Companies have reduced staff because of the impact of tariffs, because of low consumer confidence and spending, or as a ploy to pump share prices. Then they claim it’s AI, because it sounds a lot better to say that you’re reducing headcount because of AI than it does to admit that you’re cutting costs because of falling revenue.

> Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy.

Would love to know what sectors you would say are obviously under invested. Sounds like an opportunity.

The cool thing about Pixels is that not only will you have to pay extra for RAM because of AI, but some of the RAM you paid for will also be permanently reserved for local AI features, regardless of whether you use them.

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pixel-10-3-5-gb-ai-only...

Pixels only make sense if you are going to install Graphene. The Google OS is bloated with spyware.

That’s on Google. iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are amazing upgrades.

That was last year when the DRAM price crisis hadn't happened yet...

King's ransom or market price?

Also Python generators for the lulz. They help one to write extremely memory-efficient programs. Perhaps the memory shortage further helps cement Python in the language popularity charts, vis-à-vis languages that tend to load whole data in memory by default, like R.

All the more reason to hope that company crashes and burns.

These are Bonkers times we live in. Be honest, who had "Sam Altman kills Apple Computer" on their 2025/6 Bingo card?

From reading this link it sounds like OpenAI successfully dodged oligopoly bullet.

> Well, actually, there is one other important reason for this article’s existence I'll tack onto the end – a hope that other people start digging into what’s going on at OpenAI. I mean seriously – do we even have a single reliable audit of their financials to back up them outrageously spending this much money…for this? Heck, I’ve even heard from numerous sources that OpenAI is “buying up the manufacturing equipment as well” – and without mountains of concrete proof, and/or more input from additional sources on what that really means…I don’t feel I can touch that hot potato without getting burned…but I hope someone else will…

And I'd say if it ends up being shown there even is the slightest hint of impropriety going on, trial him. Up to and including capital punishment for the entire board and C level - what OpenAI already has done, even if legally on paper, IMHO is the biggest market manipulation in history, and it's not just one competitor that is suffering but society as a whole.

I don't have an issue with big companies and their super rich investors engaging in petty bitch fights. By all means, hand me some popcorn and soda. But the RAM situation, with everyone not being super rich and flush with cash from AI crazed investors being screwed royally? That is far beyond acceptable.

We need to send a message: you can't mess around with the world economy at that level without feeling serious repercussions. The lives of the billions are not playthings for the select few.

And if it turns out to be outright market manipulation, engaging in deals he doesn't even have the money committed for by others, much less actually have it on his balance sheet? Then it's time for the pitchforks, not even Madoff was this ruthless.

> I wonder whether we’ll see a secondary effect in the resale market.

I'm paying more on ebay for thinkcentre tiny and thinkpads - 12th gen intel and newer.

Refurbished spinny drives have been steadily climbing - up 50% since late last year. That's on top of the 20% mystery jump that happened in the last week of 2024.

We already are. Check eBay at the component level, which is showing it quite clearly. Look for secondary/reclaimed/refurbished components to backfill the gaps too.

Also be aware that this stuff whipsaws, if OpenAI actually takes posession of that memory and decides they can't use it and dumps, we're going to see a crash. Likewise if they back out of the deals with the memory fabs (or fail and default). There's some scary volatility on the horizon.

Are you talking about tech, pensions or credit?

SPY has been flat when measured in other currencies btw. Everything's 20% more expensive and SPY is up 20% because US money is worth 20% less.

I doubt. Microsoft would much rather sell you a thin client & a Windows 365 subscription, and Nvidia wants you to use GeForce now instead of buying a GPU.

The shortage is manufactured, I have my doubts it will "end" in a conventional sense. I'm more skeptical and feel like this is yet another consolidation of wealth and a means of taking away compute power from people, which prevents startup competition. This way the hyperscalers are the only ones that can offer any meaningful compute.

How do you figure? I'd think scarce and expensive RAM would push entry level models to smaller amounts of RAM.