cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/55081750
DRAM shortages may lead to the return of 4GB RAM smartphones and microSD slots by 2026, with flagship devices seeing a slowdown in RAM upgrades.
I’ve never understood why phones needed 16 god damn gigabytes of ram to begin with. Oh right, higher specs to justify the price increases
They need higher specs because software devs are lazy about optimization because everything is so high spec they don’t care
Well, now you’re going to get lower specs for higher prices.
Oh no, I don’t mean to come off sounding like I will gladly be scammed by big tech. My comment was purely fixated on how huge RAM has become for phones.
I bought my phone in 2019.
Are you saying that phones today DON’T have microSD?
A shocking number of them don’t. Manufacturers have figured out that they can get more people to spend a higher amount for a phone with larger fixed storage when you don’t have the choice to easily expand your storage.
I refuse to buy a phone without it for data loss reasons. If a phone dies with a sd card in it, that can be recovered in a lot of cases. If it dies without one, you are just SOL.
I like your general philosophy, but need to point out something.
If you need to recover the SD card to prevent (significant) data loss, you’ve already messed up. Backups should be handled regardless of storage medium.
Yeah no doubt, I use syncthing to do my running backups but I like to pretend that isn’t there. I kind of treat my sd card as an extra just in case backup. It catches things like downloads and the misc bullshit I have on my phone or transfer between computers.
I think he meant data on an SD card is easier to be recovered. You just take it out and bring to a store if needed. With soldered on chips, good luck with desoldering to begin with.
Yep, I usually just migrate the sd card betweent phone or clone the old one to a new one. I have incremental backups of my data from the last like 15 years becasue of that.
I bought a new Galaxy and it didn’t. So I sent it back and bought an older model. I couldn’t believe it when it showed up with nothing but a sim slot.
Im just curious, what do you need all that space for? I also would like an SD slot as well, but i also never found i need the space anyway. I will always go with the 256gb since the 512 or higher are ridiculously priced. I cache like 20gb in music from my music server, about 50 to 75gb in apps and games, and the rest is for photos and videos I take. My phone is almost 4 years and only now is it getting full, but I can just remove the pics since I back them up to my NAS.
The flagship models from the brand I bought didn’t. I downgraded just so I could have microsd. The headphone jack or better specs was a bitter pill to swallow.
Question, do you install more than 256 or 512 GB on your phone that you need an SD card or are you using it for other reasons?
1gb. Just extra storge for apps, pictures and lately drone. Not so much lately since I’ve been running my own “cloud” server.
The microSD card was removed from many phones, as I recall it was a bit before 2019 they started that.
This means price will go down… Right? It can’t possibly only go up, it has to go down when the RAM decreases right?
I want to get off the eternally increasing price ride please. Mr. Bones I want to get off!
No, because that 4gb is now the price of the 8 or 12 now. My only thought on this is how will they explain the performance drop thats inevitable when cutting it that low. My phone is about to be 4 years old and it has 12gb, it generally consumes 8gb without anything extra running. I know RAM scales, but getting it to low will mean sacrifices in performance.
You speak truth, its painful but true.
People selling their 24gb ram phones from 5 years ago for triple what they bought it
I wouldn’t be that bad if it finally got developers to optimize their darn apps for once so they make more efficient use of the limited hardware.
The phone manufacturer has to slim the OS down first… Android needs 2GB just to run, but I often see 3-3.5 GB used by the system with nothing else installed. By contrast, you can get down to 1-1.5 GB with LineageOS and Gapps installed, so it is possible to streamline, but it means a lot of functionality is stripped out.
I don’t mind how graphene runs on a pixel 9 I dumped an iPhone 15 pro because iOS 26 sucked so bad.
No AI here
Not a lot of functionality but a lot of bloat
not if they vibe code their shit
100%
My degoogled Android 16 phone already uses ~3GB of RAM. If this happens, it’s gonna be terrible.
I am so, so glad I upgraded my devices last year.
Inb4 they just put 64GB storage and with no microsd card slot and force you to use their shitty cloud
Sounds like they’re creating a problem and a “solution” at the same time, in that order.
No guys this is great. It’ll be fine. You’ll just rely on the powerful stuff in the cloud to do everything. It’ll cost more and be less efficient to create more exploitable dependencies, the shareholders will love it!
Well, at least through chicanery and backroom deals, Sam Altman has made it much more expensive (or even physically impossible) for OpenAI’s competitors to train their LLMs. And in the end, doesn’t that make the huge price shock of the consumer electronics market all worthwhile? /s
I liked how open ai was supposed to be pro human and… open and not for profit and then someone was like, hey if we fuck over every living being all at once we, ourselves, could be wealthy and the board was like “yes”
Some of the board tried, they managed to kick Altman out, but investors managed to get him reinstated.
yeah I know. I think there is a small but real possibility that historians will identify that 3 day board room drama as a very important test for humankind that we failed
Moore’s law in reverse.
