this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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8GB RAM is what my phone has.
Having that in a laptop shows what they think of people buying their kit. They think you're only buying it so you can type easier on Facebook.
My phone was manufactured in 2022, cost under USD250, and has 8gb of ram. New phones generally come with 12gb or more.
TBF 8gb of ram on a phone is actually psychotic. You really shouldn't be doing all that much on a phone lol.
Then what should I be doing on my phone?
Obviously using it as a thin client for this MacBook, duh.
nothing that requires 8GB of ram lol.
I've played the entirety of java minecraft on an old thinkpad with 4GB of ram. It didn't crash (i dont use swap)
There literally shouldn't be anything capable of using that much memory.
Is this bait? Because like, you could be rendering, simulating, running virtual machines. Lots of stuff that aren't web browsers also eat ram
Web browsers also eat ram.
I was trying to mention things that weren't just web browsers. Since it seemed the comment was about programs that use more ram than they seemingly need to.
Edit: There's like photogrammetry and stuff that happens on phones now!
And games!
games are probably a better argument honestly, but even at that point, it's not a really good experience. Unless you buy a gaming phone, which i guess is an option. Regardless the mobile gaming market is actually vile.
No, the photogrammetry apps all use cloud processing. The LIDAR ones don't, but that's only for Apple phones and the actual mesh quality is pretty bad.
i suppose photo editing would be one? Maybe? I'm not sure how advanced photo editing would be on mobile, it's not like you're going to load up the entirety of GIMP or something.
As for photogrammetry, i'm not sure that would consume very much ram. It could, i honestly don't think it would be that significant.
90% of which can be paged in the background, it's not like most people are chronically browsing the web on their phones.
Yes, they do.
and it's also the worst place to do that. If you're going to be chronically online like me, you should at least give it clear boundaries between something you carry on you at all times, and something that you regularly have access to, like my workstation for instance.
Unless you like being horribly depressed or something.
On a phone? I guess you could, although 4gb is probably enough for any video game that any amount of people use.
People use phone apps for photo and video editing these days. The common TikTok kid out there doesn't use Adobe Premiere on a desktop workstation.
Phone apps often are desktop applications with a specialized GUI these days.
i mean yeah, but even then those aren't significant filters, and what makes you think that tiktok isn't running a render farm somewhere in china to collect shit tons of data? They're already collecting the data, might as well provide a rendering service to make the UI nicer, but i don't use tiktok so don't quote me on it.
Those are also all built into tiktok, and im pretty sure tiktok doesn't require 8GB of ram to open.
Pretty sure my Adobe Premiere comparison made it clear I wasn't talking about the TikTok app itself but 3rd party apps to later upload to online services like TikTok.
Just because you are completely inapt to think of use cases, doesn't mean they don't exist.
i mean yeah, you could, but then tiktok doesn't have you on it's app, and im pretty sure tiktok has a pretty comprehensive editing tool set, otherwise people wouldnt be making as much edited content on it.
even then, there are still a lot of people that do edit video intended for 9:16 consumption, and they do it on PC. Primarily because it's just a better place to edit things.
on a phone? Why the fuck would anyone be running virtual machines on a phone?
My man, have you been to selfhosted? People are using smart phones for all kinds of crazy stuff. They are basically mini ARM computers. Particularly the flagships, they can do many things like editing video, rendering digital drawings, after they end their use life they can host adguards, do torrent to NAS, host nextcloud. You name it.
Something like the Samsung Dex app that basically turns your phone into a mini computer with kbm and a monitor wouldn't bee too bad tbh for most people. Take all your shit with you in your pocket and dock it at home or at work or whatever.
It sounds a lot more cost effective to get a used mini-pc than a flagship phone for any sort of server stuff.
literally this, anything other than a phone is going to be more purpose suited. cheaper, and probably more versatile. You're spending money on a really expensive screen that you are literally not going to be using. You might as well buy something with a shitty screen, or none at all.
I got a ThinkCentre M700 with an i7-6700, 16gb of ram and a 256gb SSD for $70 total. It's really hard to get a phone with anywhere near that value for money.
exactly, even if we're talking buying brand new modern desktop hardware. The sheer benefit you gain of having an sata port, and being able to stuff an 18TB exos drive on it, for example, will immediately pay itself off in terms of what cloud storage would cost, while also not being limited to your internet uplink speeds. You could easily run 10gig if you really wanted to. Although realistically, 2.5gb is going to be more apt.
yeah, i literally selfhost a server, running like 8 different services. I'm quite acclimated to it by now. Using a phone for this kind of thing is the wrong device. A chromebook is going to be a better alternative. You can probably get those cheaper anyway.
A big problem with phones is that they just aren't really designed for that kind of thing, you leave a phone plugged in constantly and it's going to spicy pillow itself. Let alone even trying to do that on something that isn't an android. I cannot imagine the hell that self hosting on an android would be, let alone on an iphone.
I could see a usecase for it as a network relay in the event that you need a hyper portable node or something. GLHF with the dongling if you need those.
Unfortunately, if you already have a server, it's going to be better to just spin up a new task on that server, as the cost of running a new device is going to outweight the cost of just using an existing one that's already running. Also, you can get stuff like a raspi or le potato for pretty cheap also. not very powerful, but probably more utility, especially given the IO.
Yeah, god forbids anyone ever does anything suboptimal or worse…for fun 😱
i'm not saying that you can't but like, you shouldn't buy a phone with the prospect to turn it into a server. You should sell your old phone. Or use it until it dies. That's probably going to be better in the long run honestly. You use a laptop? A desktop? An SBC even? All of those can be converted into a server with MUCH longer lifespans, and better software support.
Mobile hardware often has a support period of like 2-3 years, although that's changed recently, the hardware expectancy is probably more like 5 years at most. Meanwhile, desktop hardware, and mobile hardware in particular can easily last like 10 years. Even longer if you're ok with running legacy hardware.
My primary mobile laptops are 10 12 years old respectively. They're perfectly fine for what i need. I would NOT want to be using a 10 year old phone for that.
If you aren't the type of person buying or owning laptops, you almost certainly do not know what self hosting is.
Does the JVM count?
thats really funny, but no.
What about running a chrooted nix install and using a vnc to connect to it? While web browsing and playing a background video? Just because you don't use your ram doesn't mean others don't. And no, I don't use all my ram, but a little overhead is nice.
on a phone? I mean i suppose you could do that, but VNC is not a very slick remote access tool for anything other than, well, remote access. The latency and speed over WIFI would be a significant problem, i suppose you could stream from your phone to your TV, but again, most TVs that exist today are smart TVs so literally a non issue.
my example here was using a computer rather than a phone, to show that even desktop computing tasks, don't really use all that much ram.
Well, then by that logic, since desktop computing tasks don't really use all that ram: we shouldn't need more than 8GB in a desktop ever. Yes, my example was a tad extreme, vnc-ing into your own VM on your phone, but my point was rather phones are becoming capable and replacing traditional computers more and more. A more realistic example is when I was using Samsung Dex the other day I had 80ish chrome tabs open, a video chat, and a terminal ssh'd into my computer fixing it. I liked the overhead of ram I had above me. Was I even close to 12GB? No. But it gave me room if I wanted another background program or had to spin something up quickly without disrupting my flow or lagging out/crashing.
if this is the logic we're using, then we shouldn't have phones at all. Since clearly they do nothing more than a computer. Or we shouldn't have desktops/laptops at all. Because clearly they do nothing more than a phone.
I understand that phones are more capable, my point is that they have no reason to be more capable. 99% of what you do on a phone is going to be the same whether you spend 200 dollars on it, or 2000.
Yeah, but if you have plenty of RAM on Android, there's a chance those apps you left in the background will still be running when you go back to them, rather than doing the usual Android thing of just restarting them.
yeah i get that, but i often only have like 2 apps open on my android phone (maybe three). And even if you didn't have enough ram there's no reason android can't cache old apps to page file or something. Then you don't need to restart them, just load it from page. Given how fast modern phone storage is likely to be, this should be pretty negligible.