It's kind of insane to me that my phone (Android or iOS) requires 2GB of ram and 16GB of storage given that in 1995 my WindowsNT 4.0 PC with 128Meg of ram and maybe 2gb HD ran 3DStudio Max to render 3D effects and movies and and ran Photoshop and MS Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) and now it takes 2GB to just write messages, and share photos :P
Yes, but your 1995 Windows NT 4.0 PC ran a 640x480 display at 60Hz and graphics compositing had, at best, one-bit transparency. It took 3 minutes to boot. Websites could bluescreen it with `<img src="con">`. A malicious attachment could trick your email client into deleting your whole hard drive.
I think the interesting question is what how much we're "paying" computationally for each of those things.
The "img src=con", and to a lesser extent, the "malicious attachment" thing could be solved on the same PC by running something not-Windows. 1995 might have been a bit in the teething era for Linux and BSDs but maybe some commercial Unix would have been viable?
The "3 minutes to boot" would be largely ameliorated by using a SSD and by the fact the phone is largely a fixed hardware tree that doesn't require significant probing and dynamically selecting drivers at boot time.
Getting to a higher resolution and colour depth-- okay, maybe you need to advance to say the specs of a decent 2005 PC (1Gb memory, early x86-64 CPU, DirectX 9 class GPU) to get there.
But beyond that, I think we're paying mostly for poor software design. How many apps are loading big full-featured browser engines when all they need is libcurl and some minimal optimized rich-text system? How many apps are relying on dynamically loading content that could have been permanently baked into the bundle (i. e. a shopping app's category tree?)
Yes we're all collectively paying for poor software design by having to compensate with excellent hardware. That should tell you that "good" software is really hard to make but "good enough" software is not if you have sufficient hardware.
If you think that's bad or it makes you think that most developers can't write good software, that's the price we have to pay for innovation. As an analogy, it'd be great if manufacturing was always priced at mass manufacturing injection molded costs, but someone has to 3D print and hand assemble prototypes to prove that the idea is possible and worth making. In software, we just stop at the prototyping stage and make that the product hoping eventually we have enough time and money to redesign for mass manufacturing scale.
My NT machine ran 1280x1024 which is about 2/3 of what my phone does. More Hz is the job of the GPU and doesn't take more memory. And I'm pretty sure it took under a minute, and the boot speed would compete very well with my phone if the drive was migrated to a $25 SSD.
The security was different, but I don't think that's one of the major factors here.
It is, but its also an indication of how users are accepting to use software which is unnecessarily demanding on hardware. At some point, RAM got cheap enough for developers to stop caring about optimization.
