I've been reading through the benchmarks since and discovered -
"On a quad-core benchmark server, generating a private transaction consumes ~3.2 GB of memory and ~50 seconds of compute time."
This is a relatively high memory requirement, as many laptops only have 4GB RAM. Even on a device with 8GB RAM, a 3.2 GB memory requirement may force Zcash's private generation to go into swap space. If Zcash goes into swap, then even on the state of the art SSDs, transfer rates are at least 10 times slower than DDR-3 speeds. On older devices, transfer rates could be 30 times slower or more if Zcash goes to swap. Thus, for a typical 4gb RAM device (which usually already has at least 1gb of memory being used), Zcash's effective compute time should be between 10 minutes to 30 minutes. It is also very possible that many devices with 8GB RAM would go into swap as well, also taking between 10 minutes to 30 minutes to generate a private transaction.
In light of the above what are the implications for end users?
For example will there ever be a mobile device app for zcash given the amount of resources it takes to create and broadcast a private transaction? I would imagine a remote server building the transaction for you would be out of the question as I should think it would require access to the private components sending the zero knowledge aspect out the window.
I'm using a 4GB core i5 lenovo running ubuntu which I (used to) consider rather high end. 48% of my memory is currently allocated so from what I just read I can't use zcash because I don't have enough RAM, is that right?