You’re 16, It’s Not Ideal, But You’ll Do Just Fine ⭐

When Microsoft and then Apple established 16 GB of RAM as the baseline for modern PCs and Macs, I celebrated: This was the common-sense minimum I'd been advocating for years and a dramatic improvement over the ridiculous 4 GB minimum that Microsoft had required in Windows for even longer.

But now everything has changed. Thanks to an ongoing AI-triggered component crisis, illegal U.S. tariffs, and a never-explained war with Iran, the prices that hardware makers pay for RAM, storage, and other components critical to PCs, phones, and other personal computing devices haven't just risen dramatically, they've exploded. And now they're passing the costs onto consumers. As they must.

As a result, PCs, phones, and other devices are expected to sell in far fewer numbers this year than before. And analysts see no end to the crisis, which will extend through 2027, if not longer. It's a tough gut punch for an industry still trying to crawl out of a post-pandemic trough that, admittedly, is a problem it also partially created by over-hiring and over-spending during the year or more than most of the world stayed home. The problems facing XBOX and its competitors and partners in the videogame market are, perhaps, the most obvious example.

But as it often the case, there is a silver lining to this crisis, a flower growing in the shit that is our world today. And for those of us who care about this industry and the often unrealized promises of technology, especially those who write or at least understand software code, the upside here is surprisingly and breathtakingly positive. It's also a nice respite from the constant drumbeat of marketing and forced new features that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others have been forcing on us for years. Though they will of course market this triumph as if it had been their idea all along.

Thanks to forces beyond their control, an issue Big Tech isn't all that familiar with, these companies have been forced, finally, to do the right thing. The correct thing, if you will. They are slamming the brakes on ridiculous new features--think back to 2024's Apple Intelligence and every Copilot atrocity in Windows 11--and making radical changes to how their personal computing platforms work. They are reducing resource usage across the board, improving efficiency and code quality, and basically taking a fine-toothed comb to everything. And they are doing that so that their respective platforms--Windows, macOS, iOS, whatever--work better. Not by doing more with less. But by doing the same thing they were already doing with less.

That, folks, is what innovation looks like.

I'm not joking. Yes, it was forced on them. But something magical happens when you as a platform, app, or whatever software maker are limited by the available resources. When you are forced to make the thing work despite having less to work with. Less RAM. Less storage. Less powerful processors. Less of everything. As we know from Jurassic Park...