You may be thinking of Spolsky:

‘As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.’

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/18/strategy-letter-vi...

Seeing that in 2008 a midrange laptop came with 4GB of RAM and 10 years later, a low end laptop - like the Surface Go - still only has 4GB of RAM and has less storage than my 10 year old laptop.

Can you point to some? I am searching and even high end ones came with 2gb. If I search for midrange laptop and 2008 I get your comment of 16 hrs ago. In my (for sure limited) memory, 4gb was rare back then; high end laptops had it but I had to search for them and pay a lot. I definitely paid $3000$ for a Fujitsu with 4gb back then (I still have it, it still works and I have the receipt); best laptop ever but definitely not midrange.

This is the laptop that I still have and was used as a Plex server up until a month ago.

https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-latitude-e6500/specs/

It came out in October 2008

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6500-Not...

I think that's more of a sign that most people don't need more than 4GB to 8GB of RAM, and that storage isn't about TB anymore but about speed (HDD vs SSD).

SSDs are roughly 100x faster than HDDs, so they're superior despite offering less TB. Unless you're a gamer constantly downloading new 50GB games, most people are fine with ~300GB of storage.

People want faster storage, as opposed to more storage.

I want both.

I want 2TB of space and the speed of an SSD, and I don't want to pay much.

Hybrid hard drives seemed like the perfect solution (a few GB of flash, combined with a 2TB drive).

Sadly, nobody managed to get decent performance on hybrid drives. As far as I'm aware, none really had a good grasp of the filesystem, so none could make decisions like 'these small dll files will likley need low latency reads, stick them in the flash, while these massive mp4 files will probably be streamed, leave them on the hd'.

Good hybrid drives are possible on higher levels of the stack, e.g. http://www.enmotus.com/fuzedrive

Well. Apple will sell you a MacBook with 2TB SSD for $3700 or 4TB for $5700....