Hasn’t memory sped up dramatically in the last 20 years? Maybe that, combined with ever faster SSDs, means most people just don’t need too much more.
It used to incredibly painful to run out of ram. You’d have to hit swap or page a file in from disk that was tossed and wait hundreds of milliseconds. That was incredibly noticeable.
But now we can get things into memory so much faster having to load something off permanent storage takes a few tens of milliseconds. It’s not so objectionable.
At the same time most people are doing similar things to 20 years ago, needs haven’t scaled. Sure needs have gone up as images have gotten sharper but text is still text. Audio is still only a meg or two a minute. Unless you’re doing high end photo editing, video editing, or neural net stuff (which is mostly GPU memory?) do most people really need much more than 8/16GB?
I remember when the first MacBook Air came out someone, I think it was Jeff Atwood, posted about compile speeds.
The Air had no cooling and an underpowered little CPU so low power Apple had Intel make it just for them.
But you could pay a crazy amount of money for a teeny-tiny SSD instead of a tiny hard drive.
The SSD was so much faster than standard hard drives that machine could compile code faster than the normal MacBook Pros of the day, even though they could hold more ram and had better CPUs.
Gettin go things off disk to the CPU matters a lot. It’s OK if you don’t have enough memory if that pipeline is extremely fast.
The situation may have happened again with the M1 Macs. Not only were they faster than the Intel chips at most things but the on-package memory screams and the storage controller is fantastic.
People have reported those machines at 16GB anecdotally feeling amazing despite having half the ram of other existing machines.
It used to incredibly painful to run out of ram. You’d have to hit swap or page a file in from disk that was tossed and wait hundreds of milliseconds. That was incredibly noticeable.
But now we can get things into memory so much faster having to load something off permanent storage takes a few tens of milliseconds. It’s not so objectionable.
At the same time most people are doing similar things to 20 years ago, needs haven’t scaled. Sure needs have gone up as images have gotten sharper but text is still text. Audio is still only a meg or two a minute. Unless you’re doing high end photo editing, video editing, or neural net stuff (which is mostly GPU memory?) do most people really need much more than 8/16GB?