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Posted by birdculture 1 day ago

Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage(www.theverge.com)
113 points | 58 commentspage 2
iamkrazy 1 day ago|
First IE, now Chrome. What gets into these companies heads once they get biggest market share? And the people working for these companies. How do you sleep at night bro?
alwillis 22 hours ago|
Six figure salaries and stock options?
nicce 20 hours ago|||
The new book from lady who worked in Meta summarises it.
astrange 21 hours ago|||
RSUs. Way simpler taxes.
jmclnx 1 day ago||
Positive reinforcement anyone :) Anyway to me, 4G seems a bit lite for AI.

I always avoided Chrome as much as possible, now I have a real reason to do so.

I wonder if Chromium-based browsers is or will do the same?

zb3 1 day ago||
Did anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4?
superkuh 1 day ago||
4GB should be nothing.

It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

chatmasta 23 hours ago||
It is nothing. This whole fiasco is being blown way out of proportion when there are a hundred other issues with Chrome that we could be complaining about.
goalieca 1 day ago|||
Ironically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage.
apublicfrog 19 hours ago||
Is that true? It feels wrong. Consumer grade SSDs and spinning disks are unlikely to be the products used in enterprise.
spookie 6 hours ago|||
Look at SSD prices over the last 6 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/
windowsrookie 19 hours ago|||
AI companies bought up all the NAND manufacturing capacity, limiting the available manufacturing capacity for consumer products. These data centers also use hard drives for some of their data storage.
hnlmorg 23 hours ago|||
This was mostly an Apple problem. 1TB SSDs were dirt cheap until the last 6 months when AI bought them all up.
cesarb 19 hours ago||
A lot of entry-level laptops from other manufacturers also had small SSDs, and Windows already consumed a large fraction of that limited storage.
kn100 1 day ago|||
I reckon until the recent ai-gobbles-everything-up phenomena, this was mainly an Apple problem. Even fairly budget PCs come with at least 1tb of storage. Considering much beyond 2tb NAND gets scary pricing wise, I'm not that surprised we don't see much beyond that.
superkuh 1 day ago||
Yes, but I don't think it was just Apple. The switch to charge trap based SSD storage set all pre-built consumer computers back a full decade in terms of storage size. We were only just getting back beyond 2010 levels when the megacorps started buying up all the flash fab capacity and now even most of the HDD plates are going to enterprise.
hnlmorg 23 hours ago||
A full decade is a bit of an exaggeration. Not just in terms of storage capacity but especially when you consider than switching from HDDs to SSDs was a massive leap in performance for PCs and laptops.
superkuh 23 hours ago||
There's no debating the performance. Charge trap flash makes computing so much better. It's just a shame things went SSD only. It really isn't an exaggeration when it comes to actual storage space available per prebuilt.
hnlmorg 23 hours ago||
I don’t know what pre-builts you’ve seen, but when I bought 2 middle-range laptops 5 years ago, all the models were between 500GB to 1TB of storage.

And it’s not a trap when most people aren’t going to fill 5TB of storage with their accounts spreadsheets but they are going to notice the performance difference between an SSD and a HDD.

superkuh 19 hours ago||
Yep. 500GB-1000GB is 2010 level of storage. And I in my experience they fill it up with photos and videos and then move onto unreliable, expensive, slow externals.
protocolture 17 hours ago|||
>It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

Well we got to the point where you can have 8TB of slow storage or 256GB of faster storage and everyone chose speed.

Dylan16807 14 hours ago||
> Well we got to the point where you can have 8TB of slow storage or 256GB of faster storage and everyone chose speed.

In 2014-2015, $100 would get you either 3TB of hard drive or 256GB of SSD.

In 2023-2024, $100 would get you 2TB of SSD. (For a few months even 3TB.)

So yeah everyone chose the speed option, but the speed option should have kept growing. Outside of bargain basement models 1-2TB should have become the minimum size.

throw7 18 hours ago|||
I've got a cheap chromebook I take when traveling with 32gb ssd... 4gb is a huge chunk of that. But it doesn't matter as it constantly complains to me about no space available.
mxfh 22 hours ago||
We're at 2021 prices, but ok.
senectus1 16 hours ago||
yet to see this on any linux system yet. might be windows only so far?
ChrisArchitect 22 hours ago||
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219

Related:

Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964

WindyBolt907 13 hours ago||
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CalmBirch127 19 hours ago||
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HollowRidge427 19 hours ago||
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QuietLedge375 13 hours ago|
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