And where are these apps? today? If someone bought a i5-2500k 5 years ago they would be able to run all modern apps fine. (there are a few apps where they would want more power like virtualization or video rendering but those are the situations where nothing is good enough and people want more power regardless) In fact they could still do high performance tasks such as gaming perfectly fine because single GPUs don't even max out the old PCIe 2.0 interface. So for all practical purposes the only difference between a good machine from 5 years ago and today is SATA 3.0/NVMe for faster SSD specs.
The fact is the power of PCs peaked around 2011 for regular users i.e. not power users. They become soo excessive than people started downsizing, going from PCs to Tablets. That's what you are missing, because like you said, 'you use RAM differently from most people' so poor management skills and excessive usage are wrapping your perception of how powerful computers have gotten.
"poor management skills"? I Have systems with 4GB of RAM i use quite often, I teach students on computers with 8GB of ram and we do all kind of stuff (both virtualization and emulations, simulations and every other "tions" operations you can think of). The thing is I DO NOT WANT TO NEED to manage my damn resources on my private computer, if computer resources are cheap, why should I put myself in a situation were I need to manage them? Why should I need to delete files to free up space, why should I need to close applications to free up RAM?
You seem to lack the understanding that people stated the exact same thing in 1990, and in 1995, and in 2000, 2005, 2010, that computers "Have gotten so powerful they don't need to be any faster". Have they been right before? No?
Did the Performance of ordinary computers peak in 2011? Ok, then how come Skylake 6700k is close to twice as fast in single thread operations as the fastest i7 in 2011 (2700)? Sort of a strange saying they peaked in that case?
Why did they increase the performance that much if not needed?
As I've said, I'm tired of this discussion, I'm not going to argue with someone having the exact same arguments as people I've argued with numerous times the last 20 years.
10 years ago i remember someone arguing about the PS3 having a Bluray reader, "No game will ever need more than a DVD!" i remember someone stating. Today some top end games are like 50GB+.
I browsed using a computer with 512MB of RAM, having almost the same amounts of tabs open as now... How could I do that then when today each and every tab allocates 100MB or so in RAM? Could it be that the complexity of the browser and web pages have increased? *GASP*
I'll put a note in my calender.app about this discussion and your username, and we'll see in 2026 who was right... If ordinary mid-level computers sell with 64GB of RAM and more than 4 cores at that time (or even just 4 cores but with dynamic stem cell-like core growth and adaptation), or why not a single storage solution acting as both RAM and storage? (xpoint?) I'll have the last laugh...
I'm quite sure that even by mid 2017 most entry-level tower PCs will be equipped with at least 16GB of RAM...
(Most at ~$6-700 have 8GB today).
But this will probably be my last response to your tiring posts, because you seem to think that the computer industry needs stops just because YOUR needs might have done so (or so you believe). Keep your 2011 computer, I'm going to count on you still using it as a daily driver in 2016 (as 2011 was the year the performance "Peaked").
And sure, our students use computers from 2011 as well, and they work fine... Why? Because they run the exact same software and do the exact same labs as in 2011... As I've said, if you stick with the same software, the same websites (and hope they'll never evolve) it will work fine, forever and ever...
