The 4th Gen iPod touch had 256 meg of RAM and also did those things, with video calling via FaceTime (and probably others, but I don't care). Well, except "cross platform", what with it being the platform.
Remember that Slack does simultaneous multiple participants screen sharing plus annotations plus HD video feeds from all participants plus the entirety of the rest of the app continues to function as if you weren’t on a call at all simultaneously.
It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software.
And CU-SeeMe did that in the early 90s with even worse hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF
Even more broadly, group calls were sufficiently widely implemented to get themselves standardised 29 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323
> It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software.
The *entire operating system of the phone* is more powerful, and ran on less.
Showing me a black and white <10FPS group video call with no other accompanying software running simultaneously in the 90s is pointless.
Showing me that someone thought of a protocol is pointless. Just look at the history of HDTV. We wouldn’t really describe HDTV as being available to consumers despite it existing in the early 1990s.
I’d also like you to show me a laptop SKU sold in the last 10 years that is incapable of running Slack. If Slack is so inefficient you should be able to find me a computer that struggles with it.
Finally, I’ll remind you that Slack for mobile is a different application that isn’t running in the same way as the desktop app and uses fewer resources. The latest version of it will run on very old phone hardware, going all the way back to the iPhone 8 (2GB RAM), and that’s assuming you even need the latest version for it to function.
Meanwhile I can play back multiple 1080 videos on different monitors, run a high speed curl download, saturate my gigabit LAN with a bulk transfer, and run a brrfs scrub in the background all most likely without breaking 2 GB of RAM usage. MPV, VLC, and ffmpeg are all remarkably lightweight.
The only daily application I run that consumes a noticable quantity of resources is my web browser.
This argument is just so endless and tiring.
Saturating my bandwidth or running a btrfs scrub isn’t accomplishing the business logic I need to do my job, that’s what my web browser is doing.
Modern chat apps like Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. are extremely resource intense solely by being skinned Chrome showing overbloated HTMLs. That's it. Most of the "actual" engineering of it is outsourced and externalized to Google, NVIDIA/Intel/AMD, Microsoft/Apple, etc.
