Comment by nine_k
1 day ago
> the average domestic connection being gigabit
This strongly depends on where your domicile is, even in Europe and the US. And lot of the users live outside these areas.
> JPEG was fine in the days we had much slower connections
Except that waiting for a large picture to load was very much thing, and in many cases still is.
> What are the benefit for the final user?
A number of users are still on metered mobile plans, and have little storage on their phones. With the current situation in electronics production, new phones are not going to offer more space, cheaper; to the contrary.
Also, publishing larger / better quality images becomes easier and cheaper.
> This strongly depends on where your domicile is, even in Europe and the US. And lot of the users live outside these areas.
The rest of the world has faster Internet if anything. In general, when new Internet backbones are set up they will use the fastest tech available but then only slowly upgrade it so paradoxically regions that are lagging behind in tech can often have better Internet connections.
They also spread it thin. I see how places like Goa have very cheap and very fast 5G internet. Places like Botswana, not so much: the speed may be there, but the cost is very different. Mobile internet in India may be very inexpensive if you come from London, but it's still far from a negligible cost for locals.