Why are we not complaining about App sizes anymore?

[droplink]

I found myself searching for available hard drive space on my MacBook Air today.
One of the biggest blocks of space occupiers is the Microsoft office suite.
The whole suite of Excel, Powerpoint, Work, OneNote, Teams and Outlook takes up a whooping 10.5 GB of space!

It's just word processors, spreadsheets, note taking, chatting and email client How can it take up so much space??

Well for one thing, each app contains a 500MB folder of fonts. The same fonts in each app. 6 x 500MB = 3GB of the exact same fonts that are probably not used by anyone anyway.

Why is this not a topic?

We keep getting more hard drive (SSD) space, more RAM, faster processors but it seems that (some) software engineers are hell bound on preventing any improvement in space and speed the hardware comes with.
We used to have limitations in floppy disc size, then CD size etc. and also network speed but now that we have super-hyper-fibre speeds and no physical media, it seems that giant sizes and bloat is here to stay.

 

[baconcat_8964]

Hardware evolvement gives redundancy for software. Software evolvement eats out unused hardware, pushing hardware keep moving forward. And that's the loop.

 

[Fishrrman]

No one can actually DO anything about bloated app sizes.

If you did complain, they'd say, "if you don't like, use someone else's app instead of ours"...

 

[cateye]

You said it yourself: We get more speed and more space. So why wouldn't we... use the speed and the space? If you don't need the entire Microsoft Office suite, then uninstall it and use something else. If you do actually need it, well, the cost is 10GB of space. The end.

No one can actually DO anything about bloated app sizes.

Because it's not actually a problem.

 

[Nermal]

I have to agree that there's a huge amount of bloat these days. I have a chat app - for sending text messages and the occasional photo - that comes in at a whopping 698 MB. I'd love to log a bug report for it, but I suspect the response would be "tough".

We keep getting more hard drive (SSD) space, more RAM

Well, we were, but now we're getting much less for the same price.

 

[droplink]

You said it yourself: We get more speed and more space. So why wouldn't we... use the speed and the space? If you don't need the entire Microsoft Office suite, then uninstall it and use something else. If you do actually need it, well, the cost is 10GB of space. The end.



Because it's not actually a problem.

I disagree.
We are paying for this problem.
We are the ones that constantly need larger hard drive sizes, more RAM, faster internet. Things that are not free.
"ah but SSD get bigger" or "RAM becomes cheaper" is not an resolution as even a little bit more, is still more.
Its not free.

And all because software developers are bloating their software.

The recent increase in Mac prices could have been mitigated if we did not have to upgrade as often to maintain a set of features we had before with less.

 

[Varmann]

It is a problem since bloated software do not respond as fast as lean ones do.
With CPUs thousands of times faster than in the early 90s a word processor do not feel thousands of times faster today.

When doing daily simple tasks we still experience lag. Maybe not from the actual app on your computer, but from lots of simultaneous cloud services like storage, AI spell checking, ads, web searches etc. Not really needed, any of it.

You can still just dream about the lag-free computer that respond immediately to your commands.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Use Office Online.