by H4lcyon 5 hours ago
A perfect example of how graphs are often misleading. $/GB is a totally useless unit value because it's an arbitrary size. The unit needs to be tied to the relative usefulness for its time. The y axis should be something like $/average workstation memory or $/requirement for common compute task. It's obvious that ram is expensive right now, but it's not expensive per GB. It's expensive relative to what you need to accomplish a useful task.
But relative usefulness is entirely subjective, making it a meaningless unit. Depending on your use case you may need 256 GB or 0.5 GB.
The audience who would benefit from hypothetical $/usefulness would be people who don’t know what memory is and don’t know what’s inside of their computers, or what it does. This is a fine audience to be in and to serve, but obviously not the audience of that website and not HN.
If you think that audience is under served for memory market statistics, I encourage you to make such a website and serve that audience.
For people on HN, who do you know what memory is, $/GB is a fine metric.
This is assuming that the wide variety of use cases are evenly distributed and that larger use cases are not mostly just a lot of duplicated smaller use cases. If I have a website I will need X amount of ram. If you run a much larger website offering a comparable service you will need some multiple of X, but you don't actually need much more ram per user (assuming you're also accounting for extra infrastructure and not just the web servers). It's the same task just scaled. Relative usefulness is not subjective, you could look at a variety of tasks in different industries. Windows server 2012 had a minimum requirement of 512 MB. Windows server 2025 has a minimum requirement of 2 GB. That's 4x for the same task which totally distorts $/GBs usefulness for being able to tell you anything helpful economically. It's obviously good to collect this data, but you need to pair it with some kind of demand data for it to actually tell you anything.
> you need to pair it with some kind of demand data for it to actually tell you anything.
Again, this is entirely dependant on who is consuming the statistic and for what purpose. For some use cases, yes demand data will be quite crucial. For others it will not. It's quite apparent the site's author doesn't see this as crucial and for the purposes I need to consider memory pricing, I agree.
> The unit needs to be tied to the relative usefulness for its time.
That requires baking in assumptions, and makes the data less general.
You can go from $/gb to $/usefulness fairly trivially by adding assumptions, but you can't go the other way.
A useful task isn't a fixed thing though. Everything the 2012 computer did you can still do today with the same amount of ram we had back then.
No, not if it involves a web browser. Most web sites today will not work on a 2012 web browser.
The PC stopped existing in isolation, for most useful tasks now, it needs an Internet connection.
I use a Thinkpad T530 for reasons that are very important to me. It is the only laptop that I have, so it is what I use for every manner of portable computing.
It still does all the things I want it to do, including using modern websites with modern browsers on modern operating systems (including Windows 11).
The T530 was released in June of 2012.
The 2012 computer running a modern linux install will still work fine. I'm talking more about the specs, specifically memory. I had 8gb of ram in my computer in 2012, the Macbook Neo released this year still has 8gb and is usable for modern day tasks.
We don't _need_ that much ram, we just found new things to do with more.