Mastodawn

As much as I'm all in favour of blaming AI bros for the RAM shortage, there was always going to be a squeeze on RAM prices for some reason eventually, and we really did make sure it would be maximally painful for ourselves when we started treating RAM as functionally free.

RAM prices in 2026 are about the same as they were in 2008 when the original MacBook Air launched. It had 2GB of RAM and it ran like a goddamn dream. There is absolutely zero technical reason we couldn't ship an even better computer with 2GB RAM today — except everything these days is a JavaScript app running in a dedicated Chromium instance and needs at least its own gigabyte to run around in.

That said, it's probably pretty safe to blame AI bros for everything being a Chromium instance — I'm willing to bet it's largely the same people trying to ship something that just about works with the absolute minimum of time and effort now as it was then

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Skro Mar 4

@andrewt may i temper this with two counter arguments:
1/ the quality of visual medium has exploded (4K video is 16 times more consuming than 720p for example), needing more ram to process
2/ virtualisation (namely Docker) has become a thing and you need ram to set up a virtual machine on the fly (and docker is cool for leaving AI bros - did I hear self-hosting?)

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Andrew

@skro Yeah, definitely high-def video is a big driver — the last model of Chromecast has as much ram as the OG MacBook Air and Google generally like to go "cheap hardware with fast software" where they can.

Docker's a tricky one. Certainly the industry has leaned heavily into distributing containers with all the dependencies — Electron, Flatpak, Docker... Everything's very sandboxed, which is mostly good, but it's also a bit inconvenient and not terribly efficient. In theory we should move everyone to an OS that can sandbox _without_ all this extra stuff, but in real life that's less practical than simply manufacturing an unlimited supply of RAM 🙃

That said, my understanding is that Docker is pretty light, all things considered. On my dev machine right now, I have nine containers running, and Docker is using about the same amount of RAM as VSCode. That said, I have no idea what running all the same services natively would use. Or, indeed, what they'd use if everything but the database weren't written in Node (which is of course just Extremely Headless Chromium)