Friday 2 December 2016

What's with the desperate need for having more RAM in your phones, everyone?

There's nothing too bad about having more RAM in a device. Free RAM = wasted RAM, but it still doesn't hurt all that much to have extra RAM.
But my main concern, the reason why I always complain about devices that have an exceeding amount of RAM, is because it makes lazy developers and OEMs lazier.





Adding more RAM to a device serves two main purposes:
1) The manufacturer doesn't need to spend extra money and time in optimizing their software to make it work well with less RAM;
2) It serves as a marketing gimmick. All these companies go around showing off that their devices have so much RAM which makes them so much faster etc., which fools non-techy or uneducated people into believing these false claims.
What I hate the most about this whole "RAM Drama" is the first point I mentioned. All of these devices that come with 4-6GB of RAM can be made to work perfectly fine in nearly all ways even with lesser RAM, and people won't even notice the difference. It's just that companies don't want to do this and they don't want to optimize their fucking software.
You may argue that tech keeps evolving and back in the day we considered 3GB of RAM a lot on smartphones, but now it's a standard. This definitely holds true, but we have not yet reached a point where we even require more than 3-4GB of RAM on any phone, let alone make it a standard.


There's also the case of VR and Android Daydream, which is said to require more RAM. But at which point is VR going to become a standard/necessity? When is the time going to come where everybody needs to use it on a daily basis? How many of these 6GB RAM devices are even going to be VR/Daydream compatible to such an extent that the VR apps will be so advanced that they will actually need an extra whole fucking gigabyte or two of RAM to function smoothly? This may happen eventually, but not in 2016. We're just not in the "VR era" yet.
We have come to a point in 2016 where the rate at which hardware is advancing is surpassing the rate at which software is advancing. What I mean is that the ratio of hardware specifications to software features should always be kept at around 1:1, but today companies are adding in so much crazy hardware with shit software that doesn't take any real advantage of this incredible hardware and doesn't function efficiently. This has caused the hardware to software ratio I mentioned above to increase to 3:2 or even 2:1, which is not good and more so not even needed.

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