Hacker News

Favorites Setup
Comment by uzerkayat | original | Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
[−]uzerkayat · 2026-10-11 Sun 07:43 UTC · link
I think in upcoming days everything gonna be making comeback previously like one or two years ago I was thinking the mobile price are so dropped that mobile phones gonna be like as cheap as possible but now after the AI their price are going as high as possible and same with the computers and laptops and all.
[−]hypfer · 2026-10-11 Sun 07:44 UTC · link
I mean arguably, this is good.

The amount of waste produced due to phones not receiving new batteries and software updates was utterly insane, given what goes into making them.

[−]adrithmetiqa · 2026-10-11 Sun 08:08 UTC · link
100% agree. This is generally a good news story. The e-waste issue is one of the darker aspects of tech which is mostly ignored. We should promote brands like Fairphone and Framework that are trying to make a difference here. Reuse more of your kit!
[−]user_7832 · 2026-10-11 Sun 09:16 UTC · link
It's good if you're a tech guy in silicon valley with a good salary who used to upgrade every year to the latest pro max.

It's terrible if you're a labourer in India who buys phones under 10k INR (~100 USD) when your salary is 20k INR per month.

Unfortunately there are way more in the latter category than the former, and most of them won't know what ram is. They'll just be paying more and getting less going forward for a few years.

(Source, the salaries and phones I've seen of the staff at office. And we're in a major region you've likely heard of, not some tiny rural village.)

[−]flanked-evergl · 2026-10-11 Sun 07:52 UTC · link
The wages of the West's deliberate deindustrialization and deliberate dependence on Asian manufacturing.

30 refineries were closed in Europe in the past 15 years about, and that is just a small example of a pathological situation.

[−]hdgvhicv · 2026-10-11 Sun 09:10 UTC · link
I was reading that oil from the Middle East had to go to South Korea to be refined before being shipped as diesel to Australia.

Cost of hiring an oil tanker has ballooned massively (like 40 fold) since America decided to bomb its supply chain, so these long supply chains are massively expensive.

The Republican Party has decided that running a world of global free trade was no longer desired. America wont pay the price for another decade or two, but it will.

[−]fennecbutt · 2026-10-11 Sun 09:25 UTC · link
Well capitalism is responsible for that.

I think in a few hundred years we'll have learnt what a disgusting, poisonous system it is.

[−]lproven · 2026-10-11 Sun 10:42 UTC · link
I think in a few hundred years the very small number of survivors of humanity will be living in caves and huts in the high Arctic and in a greening slowly-reafforesting Antarctic, they'll be hunter-gatherers with maybe some simple small-scale unmechanised agriculture, and they won't have money. Maybe a barter system for a few.

Among the many other things they won't have is an economic model.

[−]flanked-evergl · 2026-10-11 Sun 11:21 UTC · link
Europeans and Americans choose to make things unsustainable and unprofitable to do in Europe, and chose to make it possible to import things cheaply from places like China and India who use slave labour and destroy the environment … and then blame Capitalism.

As you like … but blaming capitalism is not going to bring industry back, and it won't stop China from using slave labour or India from using their rivers as landfills.

[−]dr_kiszonka · 2026-10-11 Sun 08:22 UTC · link
We can get refurbished phones with 8 GB LPDDR5 for less than regular DDR5 modules.

LPDDR5 is slower but maybe a small cluster could be useful?

[−]gblargg · 2026-10-11 Sun 08:59 UTC · link
Maybe more efficient code will make a comeback.
[−]as1mov · 2026-10-11 Sun 09:51 UTC · link
I have bridge to sell you if you think that is likely.
[−]ahartmetz · 2026-10-11 Sun 10:25 UTC · link
If the trend to disregard performance with ever-increasing CPU power had not stopped, C++ and Rust wouldn't be as popular as they are. Something did change with the end of the free lunch.
[−]mitxela · 2026-10-11 Sun 11:27 UTC · link
They are popular among a certain hobbyist community, just as they were in 2024. They are not popular among application developers. Remember how FAANG app developers keep bumping into platform limits, such as the old Android limit of 65k classes in an app, and necessitating workarounds?
[−]as1mov · 2026-10-11 Sun 11:46 UTC · link
What will change is more and more software will be moved over to a cloud based subscription model with the end user device just being a crippled thin client.

And I can already see the shitwank bean counters salivating over this prospect. Imagine the possibilities, we can stuff as much DRM as we want, charge as much as possible monthly, arbitrarily restrict the terms of usage in the future. What will the user do? Run the same heavy duty software on their Intel N150 + 4GB RAM shitbox? Blah.