RAM usage has barely budged for years. Taking the '90s as baseline again: In 1991, you could get a brand new PowerBook 100 with 2 MB of RAM. In 2001, you'd get a new PowerBook G4 with 128 MB of RAM, a 64-fold increase. But in 2013, a MacBook Air came standard with 4GB, and we're looking at only 8GB in 2024.
You're taking as your example the thing people are complaining about. 8GB of DDR5 is ~$24 retail, and that's the amount Apple is putting in their $1000 laptop. PCs of the same price typically have 32-64GB.
You're also using a time period that includes COVID and when the DRAM manufacturers got busted for price fixing.
It kind of is, e.g. Steam hardware survey has more than 80% of people with at least 16GB of RAM and almost a third with 32GB, and that's a measure of installed base rather than new computers.
In the second case it started only 3 years into your measurement period instead of 7, and then right after that was COVID. It's only now that the prices are starting to resume their historical downward trend and they're still slightly above where they were when the price fixing started in 2016.
But that explains why it's not a factor of 64 during this period. It's still the case that 8GB of DDR5 is ~$24. What reason is there to not include $100 worth on a $1000 machine? Or, if some excuse for that could be generated, why isn't there a $1100 machine with four times as much?
> But in 2013, a MacBook Air came standard with 4GB, and we're looking at only 8GB in 2024.
You're saying "RAM usage", but your evidence is "RAM provisioning", which is the entire basis for the criticism. The reality is that RAM usage has increased significantly, but Apple has been stuck by the addressable memory limits they've baked into their architecture.
As another point of comparison, a 2013 iPhone 5c (technically not released until the last quarter of 2013, but we're being generous here) had 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, though you could upgrade that to 32GB. A modern iPhone has 6GB of RAM, and comes with storage from 128GB to 1TB.
>As another point of comparison, a 2013 iPhone 5c (technically not released until the last quarter of 2013, but we're being generous here) had 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, though you could upgrade that to 32GB. A modern iPhone has 6GB of RAM
Fine, take that as your reference. It still shows that growth in memory was 1000% faster not too long ago.
No, it doesn't. It shows that Apple's RAM offerings have grown at widely different rates depending on their product. Apple has been stingy on memory compared to the broader industry. The biggest EC2 instance you could get in 2013 had 244GB of memory, but today you can get one with over 24TB of memory.
...and that still proves nothing about the growth of RAM usage in that time period, because the size of the offerings in individual products are largely independent of the increases in RAM usage.
