Pay as you go is really going to make a difference

[Chris]

On Thursday, 16 January 2020 at 14:03:15 UTC, Martin Tschierschke 
wrote:
> On Sunday, 12 January 2020 at 20:29:59 UTC, aberba wrote:
>> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
>>
>> Let's kill the bloat!!
>>
>
> And there is an other effect of this ever growing bloat.
> I have two old iPads one iPad 1 and an iPad 2.
> Both are in perfect hardware condition but, you can not use them
> for much anymore, because of their small (256 and 512 MB) RAM 
> the available browsers
> are not able to render most of 'modern' webpages.
>
> So the ever increasing need of memory for the simplest tasks is 
> killing
> old hardware.
>
> The last computer, which software was optimized to the ultimate 
> was probably the Commodore C64. After that the availability of 
> more and more resources (CPU speed and RAM) has started 
> building an ever increasing amount of additional layers between 
> input and output.
>
> Just look at a simple - statically linked - "hello world" DMD 
> compilation result,
> how many C64 times floppy discs (180KByte) you would need to 
> store?
>
> I think this process will not end as long as new storage and 
> bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time.
>
> But maybe I am wrong and the next generation of software 
> engineers will bring the gain of Moors Law to us. (And the 
> resources needed for computing world wide will stop increasing.)

This was already known in the 80ies. It was called the 
hardware-software spiral or something like that. It's partly 
natural and partly by design to sell hardware and software. The 
more powerful the hardware the more software developers do (think 
of image and video editing), the more powerful the software, the 
slower the existing hardware, so you need to buy a new, more 
powerful machine, rinse and repeat...

As regards your iPads, Apple have always been mean with RAM and 
storage (unless you spend like $2000+). That's also by design, if 
Apple gives you 256/512MB RAM, they know exactly what they are 
doing, because they know that your iPad will soon be useless 
given the way the internet is evolving. They are aware of the 
hardware-software spiral.