- cross-posted to:
- hardware
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- hardware
- technology
There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple’s claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won’t be able to use it. There’s a memory requirement for Predictive Code Completion in Xcode 16, and it’s the closest thing we’ll get from Apple to an admission that 8GB of memory isn’t really enough for a new Mac in 2024.
Not necessarily. People used to write text documents while looking for references on the internet, listening to music and chatting with friends at the same time in 2010, and even earlier, but the same use case (office suite+browser+music payer+chat app) takes much more resources today, with just a small increase in usability and features.
Bloat is a complicated thing to discuss, because there’s no hard definition of it, and each person will think about it in a different way, so what someone can consider bloat, someone else may not, and we end up talking about different things. You’re right that hardware resources have been increasing in a slower rate, and it may force some more optimizations, but a lot of software are still getting heavier, without bringing new functionalities.
The software is getting heavier because content, not code. Again, we can look at the games. Take some old games like GTA V or Skyrim, they will fly on modern high end machines! Now add mods with 8K textures, higher definition models, HDR support, etc and these old games will bend over your RTX4090.
Content is also getting heavier, but both things aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s more objective to compare modern software, instead of older and newer ones. Before reddit created obstacles for third-party apps, they were famous for being much lighter than the official one, while doing the same (some even had more features). Now, if we compare lemmy to reddit, it’s also much lighter, while providing a very similar experience. Telegram has a desktop app that does everything the web version does, and more, while lighter on resources. Most linux distros will work fine with far less hardware resources than windows. If you install lineageos on an older phone, it will perform better than the stock rom, even while using a newer aosp version. If you play a video on youtube, and the same one on vlc, vlc will do the same with less resources. If you use most sites with and without content blockers, the second one will be lighter, while not losing anything important.
I could go on and on, but that’s enough examples. There is a bloat component to software getting heavier, and not everything can be explained by heavier content and more features.