4 ms·

> even the three year old hand-me-down laptop I’m using has 16GB of RAM > on my old and now quite low-end laptop Trust me, that's not a low-end laptop. Either

> even the three year old hand-me-down laptop I’m using has 16GB of RAM > on my old and now quite low-end laptop Trust me, that's not a low-end laptop. Either that has the shittiest cpu ever and a terribly mismatched amount of memory, or the author's view of that is high-end or low-end is skewed; in either case, what's low-end nowadays would be ≤4GB RAM. 16GB is LOTS, useful for developers that run large builds and/or VM's regularly. I very much like the rest of the article though, would love to see some latency improvements here and there!

arghwhat 9y ago
It may very well be your view that is skewed. For user-facing terminals/workstations, I would consider ≤8GB low-end ("unusable"). 16GB would be mid-low ("usable"), 32GB would be mid-high ("comfortable"), ≥64GB would be high ("good"). For servers, ≤64GB is low-end, ≥512GB being high-end. That 8GB would be considered low-end does not mean that no one uses it, though. Some people might still rock 2GB laptops, or use the original 256MB Pi 1 as a light desktop.
- tomsmeding 9y ago
  Apparently that's true then. I'm in the Netherlands, so maybe the US is different in this regard. Thanks for clearing up!
  - 59nadir 9y ago
    No, you're completely right in that 16 GB RAM is not considered low-end. You only have to browse for laptops for about 2 minutes to discover that 16 isn't at all "low-end".
    - arghwhat 9y ago
      I think you missed the point I was trying to make entirely (that people's definitions of "low end" differ, although "low-end" steadily moves up), but from that perspective: - 8GB is easily available and what most cheap laptops sport, - 16GB is either default or an addon for cheaper laptops, - 32GB is a premium that is not always available, and - 64GB is usually only available in huge workstation or gamer "laptops", although there are some decent-size Dells with it. While those are not my choice of metrics, they do seem to support the "low", "mid-low", "mid-high" and "high" labels I personally added. At most, you could argue that ≤8GB is low, 16GB is mid and ≥32GB is high. 10 years ago, 16GB would have been high-end for a laptop, but no more.

arghwhat 9y ago

It may very well be your view that is skewed. For user-facing terminals/workstations, I would consider ≤8GB low-end ("unusable"). 16GB would be mid-low ("usable"), 32GB would be mid-high ("comfortable"), ≥64GB would be high ("good"). For servers, ≤64GB is low-end, ≥512GB being high-end. That 8GB would be considered low-end does not mean that no one uses it, though. Some people might still rock 2GB laptops, or use the original 256MB Pi 1 as a light desktop.

tomsmeding 9y ago
Apparently that's true then. I'm in the Netherlands, so maybe the US is different in this regard. Thanks for clearing up!
- 59nadir 9y ago
  No, you're completely right in that 16 GB RAM is not considered low-end. You only have to browse for laptops for about 2 minutes to discover that 16 isn't at all "low-end".
  - arghwhat 9y ago
    I think you missed the point I was trying to make entirely (that people's definitions of "low end" differ, although "low-end" steadily moves up), but from that perspective: - 8GB is easily available and what most cheap laptops sport, - 16GB is either default or an addon for cheaper laptops, - 32GB is a premium that is not always available, and - 64GB is usually only available in huge workstation or gamer "laptops", although there are some decent-size Dells with it. While those are not my choice of metrics, they do seem to support the "low", "mid-low", "mid-high" and "high" labels I personally added. At most, you could argue that ≤8GB is low, 16GB is mid and ≥32GB is high. 10 years ago, 16GB would have been high-end for a laptop, but no more.