“Is it just me or is it getting crazier out there?”
Smartphones leaning closer to professional cameras is understandable, but why are their developers keen on making mobiles buffed up on RAM? Brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, and even Samsung are following the recently-invented trend of ramming up the specs with higher numbers. Nowadays, it’s not about “Here’s our phone, it can do X better than the competitor”, it’s more about “Here’s our phone, it has X amounts of more RAM than the competitor.”
This RAM race, in my opinion, is all because of a simple but crudely accurate translation made by the marketing and sales teams of these companies. They think that more RAM means more speed. Smartphones that have been released recently, come in two or more variants. Take Samsung Galaxy Note 10 for example. The regular version of this smartphone features 8 GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. On the other hand, Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus has 12 GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage.
Sure, you need a lot of RAM to run some demanding applications and games, but not everybody uses them. Normal usage including light video games, videos, and music-playing that never requires more than 3 GB RAM. The phone gradually becomes slow because of unnecessary files in the cache and overheating. The speed can always be restored with proper care.
Major brands running the RAM race may resort to cutting down quality to make overpowered smartphones made easily available to the public. It also leads to increasing battery capacity, which in turn, increases the chances of overheating. Moreover, build quality is also lowered so the smartphone can fit a particular budget. All that is left in the end is an overheating and fragile smartphone that you may not need unless you game 7 hours in aday.
The market needs to be free of such a mindset and only the consumers can change it by not buying a smartphone high on RAM on steroids.
