40 tabs open at once? That doesn't need a lot of RAM if websites were programmed to do what they actually do: Display text and images.
I don't think touch needs any special amount of RAM, would it differ for the operating system than a mouse?
Photoshop and Lightroom <- These I think fall into the category of special use cases for professionals, which absolutely need more RAM than a home user. For somebody who only occasionally wants or needs to do a bit of advanced photo editing, it's okay to wait a bit longer for operations.
> I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.
Are you sure about that? If you actually sat down to only work, without having YouTube videos open or other things going on in the background? If you close your Amazon Black Friday tab you already liberate 500 megabytes of RAM.
> PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy.
No, in this case it is you who didn't understand or didn't want to understand. Nowhere did I say only. But the things I listed are what normal people do mostly. And nobody would want to type a long report or do spreadsheets on their phone.
> So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.
Not at all. Most computers are used by office workers at their job, and I'd bet that most home computers are also used for non-intensive purposes. But I think you're right in what direction things are moving.
Technology should be allowed to evolve as needed. Smartphones were also supposed to be phones, and I'm sure I'm not the only to basically ignore the phone app unless forced to.
I'm totally fine with progressive web apps for instance, or how Figma is pushing the boundaries to bypass the whole native Store requirements.
> Lightroom
Photography is a mildly popular hobby. Even as phones are king, around 10 million dedicated cameras were sold last year [0], so having Lightroom as a home user isn't as exotic as you make it sound like.
The issue is not really the wait time, it's the instability and crashes, which are aliviated by less back and forth between the disc and the RAM. It's totally Adobe's fault, but I also think it wasn't a simple problem to begin with.
> only work, without having YouTube videos
I need YouTube and I suspect many do. Currently all of last year's WWDC sessions are on Youtube, as do most video tutorials, business presentations etc. Also work BGMs, podcasts, live streams etc. are resources people also use to keep focus or stay awake through their working day.
People used to listen to their own sound on dedicated devices, IMHO it mostly moved to their computers, especially as bluetooth gives more flexibility to move around.
> office workers at their job
I'd wager most of these workers job involves more than what you're giving them credit for. I've followed CS agents dealing with user requests for instance, one of the lowest job level in our org, and that involved a lot of multitasking, juggling with the ticketing system, and keeping stuff at hand. In particular the agent I was shadowing had a discord call going on about a third of the time, with me in a Meet session. Sure, 20 years ago we would have done it a different way. But nowadays that's just how they're doing it.
Traditional data entry jobs might be different, but how many of them still exist as of now ?
[0] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2386206926/cipa-data-2025-...
Certainly, you say it yourself: as needed. There is no need for giant amounts of RAM for most productive and entertaining computing tasks.
> The issue is not really the wait time, it's the instability and crashes, which are aliviated by less back and forth between the disc and the RAM.
Very good point! I don't completely recognize this problem, because in the long time I've used Photoshop and such, I haven't noticed a lot of crashes.
> People used to listen to their own sound on dedicated devices, IMHO it mostly moved to their computers, especially as bluetooth gives more flexibility to move around.
Sure, but audio doesn't need a lot of system resources, and neither should video. A feature length film is a couple of gigabytes, and can't take up more RAM than its entire content.
> I'd wager most of these workers job involves more than what you're giving them credit for.
You could do a lot of multitasking between well coded work apps in a well coded operating system. I remember doing that. But if the ticketing system takes a gig of RAM in the browser when it should take a 100 megabytes if made properly...
I remember having video calling fully functioning in Skype with 2 gigs of RAM.
The best outcome of all would be that memory hungry people like Mr Altman started paying home computer users for renting part of their RAM for their AIs to munch on. In the meanwhile, the home user could have the same performance for their computing as before while only using half of their RAM.
And it's already been proven: My Macbook with 8 gigs of RAM is radically faster and more performant than any PC with 16 or 32 gigs of RAM for any kind of task thrown at it.
Everything you listed worked for decades with a lot less RAM, but was also more limited and potentially different in substance in critical ways. It's the "Mom I want X ! -> We already have X at home" meme, where the "X at home" is some poor version of what was requested.
I understand some people could still enjoy a retro style experience, but I wouldn't give up on my HDPI displays for instance. Or touch support. Or keeping 40 tabs open instead of hand managing my tabs or rely on some dumb auto-close algo.
Spreadsheets can now have dozens of thousands of line and still be snappy to manipulate, we can play high def videos while doing actual work without freezing the whole system. Photoshop and Lightroom used to be crash junkies for even basic operations and people would baby the settings to aleviate that; with the RAM we have now it has become a somewhat decent situation (still crashes, just way less)
I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.