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That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is ma

by bhauer 9y ago

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now. * A surprising number of people still have Flash installed. I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk?

dannyw 9y ago
You seem to assume a large portion of users are software engineers or tech people. You may consider a 16GB ‘bare minimum’, but not everyone needs that - nor can even afford that (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750).
- bhauer 9y ago
  > (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750). To me, the hardware report shows technology is quite stagnant on display resolution and memory. 1366x768 is a resolution from 2002 or thereabouts. 4GB was common in desktop computers in 2005. ~15 years have passed and consumers in the $750 price range are still hamstrung with 1366x768 and 4GB of memory? I would expect better from a $750 phone, let alone a computer. I think we're actually talking about computers that are very old and have never been upgraded or new computers in the $200 to $400 range.
  - badestrand 9y ago
    My 1-year-old MacBook Air runs 1440x900 with 8 GB and it cost >$1.000 IIRC. So neither "very old" nor $200-$400 range.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      MacBooks Air, Macs Mini and Mac Pro during last few years were ancient as soon as manufactured. Apple is being criticized for not updating these model lines. So yes, the innards of your 2017 MBA are very old. It has Broadwell generation (circa 2014) CPU/GPU, and one optimized for power draw at that (i.e. a slower one).
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > 1366x768 is a resolution from 2002 or thereabouts. In 2002, the most common resolutions were 4:3, not 16:9, not only because notebooks were not mainstream yet. > 4GB [RAM] was common in desktop computers in 2005. That's the time when notebooks became mainstream iirc. I purchased a gaming notebook in 2006, it had 1 GB RAM. I also bought a midrange notebook in 2009 which also came with 1 GB. (I later upgraded to 2 GB aftermarket.)
    - bhauer 9y ago
      > In 2002, the most common resolutions were 4:3, not 16:9, not only because notebooks were not mainstream yet. Sure. I didn't really intend to get into fine-grained technical details, but yes, back then 4:3 was the predominant aspect ratio. In fact, some of the 17" LCD displays from the time were that awkward 5:4 resolution of 1280x1024. But putting specifics aside, the broader point is that computing technology—at least with respect to the most popular display resolution and amount of memory—is stagnant. In this thread there are people arguing for technology asceticism and making the point that 4GB and 1366x768 are good enough. And maybe they are for some people. I am surprised there are so many who are satisfied with this particular flavor of "good enough." (Though I would like to see how well that correlates with mobile device technology asceticism.) I want the hardware industry to do better, and I thought things had started improving a few years ago when 4K displays emerged and the shackles of "High Definition" (1920x1080) were cast aside. But this data shows adoption of 4K displays for computing is so low it's not even measured as such. That disappointed me, but it's unsurprising. What surprised me was realizing 1920x1080 isn't the top dog I thought it was—in fact, the situation is worse than I thought. And to my mind, all of this feeds into the subject at hand: an operating system vendor getting stuck. The embrace of "good enough" is suffocating.
- RX14 9y ago
  My brand new thinkpad with 16gb ram and a 1080p ips display cost only £670. These specs aren't expensive any more. That being said, my parents are perfectly happy using Google chrome on 2gb ram with a core 2 duo. And that's not with only a few tabs.
  - Ezhik 9y ago
    £670 is not "only".
  - emptyfile 9y ago
    Not a single person in my office has a laptop that costs over ~400 GBP. It may come as a shock to you but there exists a world outside of California/London/random-tech-hub
  - ionised 9y ago
    The average person won't spend that much on a mobile device.
  - crtasm 9y ago
    You can't walk into/click onto a high-street store and buy that though, and my assumption is that's where most people buy laptops. £670 is much more than people I know want to spend on a new machine. None of them have ever mentioned screen resolution when i've asked what they want in a laptop.
notafxn 9y ago
I will hope this post is ironic and move on.
dizzystar 9y ago
There's always been a strong impedence between users and developers. Calling a website "Apple first" isn't a compliment. Websites become a problem on slow internet, which is surprisingly common in companies. This is because they are often located in cheap rent areas with little infrastructure.
ant6n 9y ago
> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768 It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users.
- nostalgeek 9y ago
  > It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users. Because most people making websites don't care about basic usability, even though they have stats that shows their users use small laptops they'll still stick a fixed header that takes 1/5 of screen real estate because it's the latest "bootstrap/material design fad". Google does this a lot, which is ironic with them pushing "AMP" on mobile, they can't even give regular people a good on experience on their laptop.
rb808 9y ago
If you look at Chromebooks, most are 4GB, often 2GB. These are the mainstream new laptops that people will expect to run for 5 years+.
- bhauer 9y ago
  Yeah, but that link is a Firefox hardware report. How many Firefox users are on Chromebooks?
- jethro_tell 9y ago
  Think is 'expected to run for <5 years' since the device has 5 years of software support. I find that to be a bit of a bummer, but it's still better than android's 3
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
enitihas 9y ago
I think your experience may be an outlier. Being in an University for the past 4 years, I observed that 90% of the laptops used by the students were 1366*768, and majority were 4GB, followed by 8GB. I don't remember anyone having any problems running the latest chrome or Firefox. I think people even managed to run things like SolidWorks or Matlab perfectly fine on those machines.
- PuffinBlue 9y ago
  None of the other things surprise me, but that screen resolution does a bit. It's been about 8 years since I last had a laptop without at least 1080p I think.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    Do you buy your laptop for screen real estate or for "small and not too heavy"? Because the latter is what most people buy for, as far as I can tell.
    - PuffinBlue 9y ago
      Those things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive anymore. Something like a Dell 7270 will cost about £275 on eBay. 12 inch screen and 1080p touchscreen. Some question the wisdom of a small screen like that with scaling and whatnot but I've always found it fine.
      - bzbarsky 9y ago
        That's fair. Though I wonder how many people buy computers on ebay as opposed to dell.com or amazon.com or an actual brick-and-mortar store. That said, I suspect most people over the age of 35 or so can't read text at "normal" size on a 1080p 12inch screen, so if they want a 12 inch screen they have to either scale up their text or drop the resolution. And I believe the reported resolution in the Firefox telemetry is the one the OS thinks it's using, not the one the hardware has.
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
Endy 9y ago
> * In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now. In 2018, my computer only has 2GB RAM and runs more than fast enough for what I need on a 32-bit processor. I don't understand why some people always want bigger hardware numbers, rather than better software. > * A surprising number of people still have Flash installed. I do too, I don't see how it's abnormal. > I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk? I can barely conceive of how narrow-minded and myopic your technological experience must be that you feel only the latest and "greatest" is viable. As someone who browses the Web regularly, I spend a lot of time on places like HN, YouTube, etc. My screen resolution is 1440x900 - one step above the 1366x768. As I said, 2GB RAM, etc. This is why I've argued, constantly, against the nonsense of Chrome and "modern" Firefox. That's why users of old computers are going to Pale Moon if they know about it, or back to Internet Explorer, or just not upgrading to the newest Firefox. Your technological experience is very much a high-class experience, but you have to understand that there are users all over the world and in all economic positions. All this push toward expecting the best and most modern only works to force out the common person - in America it's the poor person in the ghetto who still is well above the position of people in other, even less prosperous nations. Most people, if they are lucky, have a used <$200 laptop which is often a decade or so old. Library computers are often almost as old - I know two libraries which are still running their .5GB 32-bit Windows NT2000 computers as patron-access machines because they are in poor areas and simply cannot afford to upgrade. People who have the view that everyone should have base access to the latest, greatest, and most wonderful hardware upset me greatly. I have one comment about it that seems constructive. If you think it's so important that they should have this, you should provide it. If you can't give every person who has an old reliable computer (that they can repair) the newest bleeding-edge tech (and give them service when it inevitably breaks), then you need to understand that they have valid concerns too - and help provide better software and help others like you to understand what reality looks like for most of the world.
reaperducer 9y ago
It doesn't surprise me too much. I develop for an organization that serves people of mid-to-lower economic strata. 10% of our users are still on Windows XP. We get caught up in the tech sector echo chamber and don't realize that upgrade cycles for millions of people is a lot slower than we are used to. I think that it's not surprising to see what Firefox is reporting. A lot of people go to Firefox seeking something that runs faster or better than what came with their Windows box years ago. Most of the people we serve on low-end computers are Chrome, not IE/Edge.
bayindirh 9y ago
> In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. Most of the tasks in the real world doesn't need multiple 4K displays, including low level and systems development. Most people read stuff, and as a developer and system administrator, when the text is looking good, this means the resolution is enough. > In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now. 8 GB is more than enough for most people. My family's Win10 desktop is happy with 4GB, my office desktop is cozy with 8GB. My own desktop has 16GB of RAM, but it runs many, albeit small, virtual machines. "The hardware is cheap, let's waste it" mentality doesn't help anyone and it's wrong. I've written some state of the art algorithms which use 1.5MB of RAM and make the CPU scream for cooling (I develop high performance computing software as a side-academic gig), so like every resource, RAM should be used sparingly. Edit: I've no comment for flash. I think it's a forgotten remnant of old systems.
- kobrad 9y ago
  It's not about needing 4k, it's about the prices. While it's normal in the usa to get a couple of these monitors for me the expense is impossible. And I really would use a 4k monitor. It's a big world, and most of it is not the usa
  - bayindirh 9y ago
    Actually, it's not always the price. Serious developers or seasoned computer enthusiasts doesn't change rigs every couple of years. If one's system is performing well enough, and the user gets used to it, system upgrade can be deferred until some technology or computing resource becomes necessary. When something breaks, the broken part is replaced and upgraded in most cases. Personally, I've just upgraded from 1680x1050 to 1920x1080. My old monitor was 10 years old, and was performing relatively well. I bought a new one, because it started to show its age (mostly backlight age).
rogerbinns 9y ago
It is worth contrasting with the Steam survey which covers several million gamers (of varying degrees of dedication) -- http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey Of note, 8GB is most popular with 1920x1080 resolution.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Would probably be higher if memory prices weren’t so damn high. Same goes with video resolution. I bet we’ll see a quick bump once video card prices start to drop.
  - Endy 9y ago
    Every time we've said "when video card prices start to drop", we've seen about 3 months of drop, and then the companies come out with some new thing that increases the prices yet again.
- rndmize 9y ago
  Simplified Chinese being the most common language (by far at 52%) threw me for a loop, though it probably shouldn't in this day and age. (For context: English - 23%, Russian - 7.7%, Spanish - 2.8%).
  - gruez 9y ago
    That's probably due to the influx of chinese players coming in to play pubg or whatever in the last few months. A more "representative" sample could be found in the months leading up to the spike: https://web.archive.org/web/20170606030609/http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://web.archive.org/web/20170606030609/http://store.stea....
kijin 9y ago
When I bought my father a new laptop a couple of years ago, I specifically looked for a model with 1366x768 resolution because a lot of legacy apps he depends on for his work have terrible HiDPI support. "Upgrading" to 1920x1080 with HiDPI turned off (100% scaling) would have made everything too small for his eyes. Moreover, even apps that do support HiDPI often look like crap at 125% scaling -- the default setting on Windows 10 for most 1920x1080 laptops these days. And if you go up to 150%, you only get 1280x720 effective pixels. That's even less information density than 1366x768. Most legacy Windows apps expect to be able to use at least 768 vertical pixels. The search turned out to be more difficult than I expected, because most high-end PC laptops with good build quality had already transitioned to 1920x1080 by early 2016. I finally found the perfect model for my father and told him that he should expect to use it for a long, long time since it's the last laptop that will ever support his apps. Fortunately, it's a well-built Broadwell i5 with a number of upgradable components, so it should last well into the early 2020s.
ryandrake 9y ago
I think if more developers had to live on 768 line displays, slow CPUs and 4GB RAM, we would have much better performing software.
boomlinde 9y ago
My main home PC is a laptop matching those specs. I frequently use it for development and web browsing. You can comfortably fit two terminals in columns with that resolution. The RAM is mainly an issue when browsing, but killing all the ads and defaulting to no Javascript helps. A surprising amount of websites still only use Javascript for "progressive improvements" i.e. they'll use it just for pop-ups, hijacking scrolling, randomly moving menu bars in and out of view, implement some nonsensical partial loading of the main content etc. but will happily show you the full text without a hassle with a consistent user interface once you turn it off. For a while I used Dillo but that became less viable as an option over time. That said, I do waste a lot less time on shitty websites on this setup.
pmontra 9y ago
Personally I won't touch anything with less than 32 GB and 1080p, but people that use a PC like a tablet with a keyboard and a larger screen have different needs. They are the vast majority of buyers. A friend of mine is thinking about buying a new laptop. We were looking together at what's available in the sub 400 Euro range, basically everything is 4 GB and 1366x768. Add some 200/300 Euro and 8 GB and 1080p start to appear in the lists. Guess what people buy most? The cheapest stuff. By the way, the new laptop must be Windows because anything different will be too difficult to cope with after 30 years of training. He's replacing the old one (only 2 years old) is getting too slow. Probably a malware party but disinfecting that machine it's a hopeless effort. That one and the previous ones were periodically cleaned and/or reinstalled but there is no way to change those ingrained clicking habits. No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. I told him that he'll be back with a slow PC soon and that he's wasting his money, and I've been wasting my time.
- distances 9y ago
  > No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. This is the weirdest part for me, as I've myself never met a person who'd like to see ads. Installing an adblocker seems to usually be a relevation for people.
- gruez 9y ago
  >I won't touch anything with less than 32 GB why would you need that much ram? are you running 3+ VMs all the time?
  - Joeri 9y ago
    I had to move from 16 to 32 gb when I did hadoop development and needed to run a vm hadoop system locally. It all depends on your workload.
  - tekknik 9y ago
    I run 64GB in a mac pro, with about 1/2 of it used as a cache for a zfs volume. With it taking half of my ram along with my other daily apps (safari, sublime text, etc) I’m only left with ~10GB free.
s_kilk 9y ago
> I know many people economize on memory Most just don't have a choice. Plenty of laptop models top out at 8GB,with 16GB either being confined to larger form-factor machines, or being so outrageously expensive that no-one in their right mind would bother. I mean, look at the current line of macbook pros, you simply can't get 16GB without going up to the 15-inch model.
extra88 9y ago
> 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. Could the chart be reporting CSS pixels rather than hardware pixels? Macs are only 7% of total Firefox users but the majority of Mac hardware has a "Retina" display with a higher resolution than these. BTW, 2560x1440 is listed with about ~1% but it's not visible because the line and text is black on a black background.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  I've been using 2560x1080 for almost a year now and will never go back. 21:9 is the way to go.
  - Viper007Bond 9y ago
    What size is that? I run a 34" 3440x1440 21:9 and it's nearly a bit too wide. EDIT: https://www.asus.com/us/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/ROG-SWIFT-PG348Q/ https://www.asus.com/us/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/ROG-SWIFT-PG3... 100Hz is awesome, even for just browsing the web.
    - StanislavPetrov 9y ago
      Its 29". I've had many monitors, both bigger and smaller, and this is by far the best I've had for gaming and everything else. Exact model: http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-29UM68-P-ultrawide-monitor http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-29UM68-P-ultrawide-monitor
    - jsgo 9y ago
      I have the same monitor and it is the first time I've started to run Windows apps more in actual windows than full screen/full screen-like. Too many sites waste a bunch of horizontal space on it, so makes sense to shrink the window. Great monitor though. Both for gaming and for general usage.
sandov 9y ago
>disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum My main computer has 8GB RAM. I don't know why I would need more than that. Right now I have firefox with 15 tabs, qt creator and 3 terminals open and I'm only using 2.5 GB of RAM. Unless I suddenly wanted to get into heavy video editing I don't think I'll feel the need to upgrade soon.
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  The more RAM you have, the more your OS will use. My 16GB laptop is currently using 8-9GB and I don't have much open. What's the point of RAM if you don't use it? If I get low on free RAM, but OS will discard some unneeded stuff but otherwise it properly uses it as a cache.
  - sandov 9y ago
    Almost all operations I command are executed instantly by my computer, so I see no need to use more RAM. I think a good SSD and GPU are much more important than having a lot of RAM if you want to improve general user experience.
lazycouchpotato 9y ago
I have a 1366x768 laptop with 4 GB of RAM.. It's included in the university fees and there's no way of opting out of it, so I had to take it. Not only do they overcharge us for it, finding a seller is hard for it too, so I decided to wipe it clean and use it as my daily driver.
- michel-slm 9y ago
  Ouch, which university is that? I've heard of universities negotiating deals to get student discounts with certain vendors, and others requiring students (normally in engineering programs) have laptops meeting certain requirements, but this is the first time I hear of students having to purchase underpowered laptops.
squarefoot 9y ago
"I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768." I've used for years a CoreDuo system+4GB with Firefox then PaleMoon playing videos in FullHD on 23 and 27 inches monitors, and never got even close to hit the swap partition unless I was running virtual machines or heavy games. Now I'm on a i5 Debian+XFCE with 8gigs, one Waterfox (privacy oriented Firefox derivative, thanks to the HN user who pointed me at it) instance with 4 tabs opened and a shell with 2 tabs; here's free output: ~$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 8037636 1194044 4182928 187332 2660664 6555172 Swap: 8249340 0 8249340 And this one while watching a 1080p Youtube video at fullscreen. ~$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 8037636 1453204 3761776 280824 2822656 6202520 Swap: 8249340 0 8249340 The operating system probably makes a difference [1], but anyway Firefox runs perfectly on 4 gigs or less. That RAM amount is plenty if well used. [1] ~$ uname -svo Linux #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 (2017-09-19) GNU/Linux (a bit older RT kernel needed for low latency audio)
nikanj 9y ago
I find it extremely sad that us developers really have no idea what our sites are used on. Works great on my iPhone X and iMac Pro? Perfect!
sjapkee 9y ago
There is no real need in 4K resolution, so that's why is's not so popular.
- deno 9y ago
  People that think they don’t need 4K either haven’t seen a 4K display in person or have poor eyesight. It’s a leap like upgrading from HDD to SDD, in the display world. Unless you just need your monitor for gaming. New gen temporal aliasing mostly makes up for the lack of pixels.
  - sjapkee 9y ago
    I have a system with 7200 rpm HDD and system with SSD. Not so much difference. It was a waste of money. Just like 4K display.
    - deno 9y ago
      I don’t believe you. There must be something pathological with your SSD or something else in your system. SSDs have an order of magnitude faster random access performance (both read & write) and you can measure that. NVMe drives additionally increase parallelism by a significant margin. Typical workloads are very sensitive to this metric. At least at cold boot you should see significant improvement in performance. Font rendering, likewise, you can just see[1]. See the full page[2] for more examples. If you have good eyesight, you will see a difference. I could see how 4K to “retina” (>260 PPI) might not be worth paying extra to some (though I personally want the highest PPI I can afford), but 96 PPI to ~185 PPI is a world of difference. It goes from blurry to sharp. That’s not all—because LoDPI text rendering often involves subpixel rendering techniques, HiDPI also brings significant improvement in contrast. For crying out loud, some people even get headaches from the blurry subpixel rendering! [3] [1] https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5.jpg https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5.... [2] https://www.eizo.be/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understanding-pixel-density/ https://www.eizo.be/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understandin... [3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/p7.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/p7.html
Feniks 9y ago
Man I love that bubble you live in ;) You can run win10 on a 15 year old laptop if you want. Hardware and software compatibility has always been MS strength, something nobody can even come close to.
khedoros1 9y ago
> Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk? Yes. The laptop I keep by the TV has 4GB of RAM, a 1366x768 screen, and a quad-core Celeron, that I think is some descendant of one of the Atom families. I tend to keep 10 or fewer tabs open, avoid sites that use really heavy Javascript (well, I do that anyhow...), and usually don't have much else besides a Bash window running. It's got a spinning-rust drive, and swapping would be very obvious. With my usage patterns, it doesn't swap. Performance-wise, it's a fair bit nicer than my phone, at least.
equalunique 9y ago
This surprises me too, but I also must recognize my own inherent bias: The places I have worked in for the past five years all have "enterprise" laptops which are loaded down with all kinds of agents, clients, and background services which just put a silly load on just an idle system. A measly 4GB of RAM would not be enough to run MS Office alongside IE. The screen issue does bug me though. Not just a haxxor feature anymore, all basic Windows users can leverage the split-screen capability to put two applications side by side - on a 720p screen, there really isn't enough screen space to practically do this. I think 1080x1920 or at least 900x1600 should be the standard for 2018.
morganvachon 9y ago
> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. The laptop I'm typing this on is exactly that: A Lenovo Ideapad from 2010 with 4GB and 1366x768 resolution, running Bunsenlabs Linux and the latest Waterfox (Firefox fork with telemetry removed). It's blazing fast even without a SSD; the browser starts in the blink of an eye and it takes nearly 70 tabs open to start slowing down. Yes, the resolution can be limiting for some websites, but most are designed well enough to work fine on it. In fact, on text-heavy sites like HN I find myself browsing at 120% magnification for less eye strain. I couldn't imagine what 1080p or higher on a 15" screen would feel like, but it would likely be painful. It's actually more comfortable to read on than my iPad mini for that reason as well, and of course typing is a dream compared to any other laptop I've used, to say nothing of klunky touchscreen keyboards. Granted, it would be slower with a more bloated Linux distro and certainly was with Windows 7, but when it comes to the OS I prefer minimalist and stable to kitchen sink and bleeding edge.
megy 9y ago
I went back from a macbook pro 16gb to a macbook with 8gb. I do iOS, web, hardware and TV development. I have not had a problem. I can have xcode, eclipse, firefox, safari, mail bbedit and a few other programs running fine.
thefounder 9y ago
How is 16GB bare minimum when it's the max you can get on most laptops?
HugoDaniel 9y ago
640k ought to be enough for everyone
coonery 9y ago
4k is overrated. 27" 1440p is good enough, plus current GPUs are able to push 100+ FPS with such resolution (they fail miserably with 4k resolution).
- hypertextcoffee 9y ago
  >(they fail miserably with 4k resolution) I use an external GTX 1070 over Thunderbolt 3 on a 2017 Dell XPS 15, and have 2 2160p monitors. 4K gaming is no problem at the refresh rates that 4K offers (usually 60Hz)
  - ionised 9y ago
    > 4K gaming is no problem at the refresh rates that 4K offers (usually 60Hz) Subjective. Depends entirely on the settings you are using and the resulting frame rate at that resolution.
Svoka 9y ago
Sounds like April Fools joke/Onion article BREAKING: Bay Area developer discover that California is surrounded by rest of the World.
apolymath 9y ago
Most corporations can’t afford to upgrade hardware and most likely run on very old hardware running windows xp or if they’re lucky, windows 7.

by bhauer 9y ago

dannyw 9y ago

You seem to assume a large portion of users are software engineers or tech people. You may consider a 16GB ‘bare minimum’, but not everyone needs that - nor can even afford that (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750).

bhauer 9y ago
> (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750). To me, the hardware report shows technology is quite stagnant on display resolution and memory. 1366x768 is a resolution from 2002 or thereabouts. 4GB was common in desktop computers in 2005. ~15 years have passed and consumers in the $750 price range are still hamstrung with 1366x768 and 4GB of memory? I would expect better from a $750 phone, let alone a computer. I think we're actually talking about computers that are very old and have never been upgraded or new computers in the $200 to $400 range.
- badestrand 9y ago
  My 1-year-old MacBook Air runs 1440x900 with 8 GB and it cost >$1.000 IIRC. So neither "very old" nor $200-$400 range.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    MacBooks Air, Macs Mini and Mac Pro during last few years were ancient as soon as manufactured. Apple is being criticized for not updating these model lines. So yes, the innards of your 2017 MBA are very old. It has Broadwell generation (circa 2014) CPU/GPU, and one optimized for power draw at that (i.e. a slower one).
- majewsky 9y ago
  > 1366x768 is a resolution from 2002 or thereabouts. In 2002, the most common resolutions were 4:3, not 16:9, not only because notebooks were not mainstream yet. > 4GB [RAM] was common in desktop computers in 2005. That's the time when notebooks became mainstream iirc. I purchased a gaming notebook in 2006, it had 1 GB RAM. I also bought a midrange notebook in 2009 which also came with 1 GB. (I later upgraded to 2 GB aftermarket.)
  - bhauer 9y ago
    > In 2002, the most common resolutions were 4:3, not 16:9, not only because notebooks were not mainstream yet. Sure. I didn't really intend to get into fine-grained technical details, but yes, back then 4:3 was the predominant aspect ratio. In fact, some of the 17" LCD displays from the time were that awkward 5:4 resolution of 1280x1024. But putting specifics aside, the broader point is that computing technology—at least with respect to the most popular display resolution and amount of memory—is stagnant. In this thread there are people arguing for technology asceticism and making the point that 4GB and 1366x768 are good enough. And maybe they are for some people. I am surprised there are so many who are satisfied with this particular flavor of "good enough." (Though I would like to see how well that correlates with mobile device technology asceticism.) I want the hardware industry to do better, and I thought things had started improving a few years ago when 4K displays emerged and the shackles of "High Definition" (1920x1080) were cast aside. But this data shows adoption of 4K displays for computing is so low it's not even measured as such. That disappointed me, but it's unsurprising. What surprised me was realizing 1920x1080 isn't the top dog I thought it was—in fact, the situation is worse than I thought. And to my mind, all of this feeds into the subject at hand: an operating system vendor getting stuck. The embrace of "good enough" is suffocating.
RX14 9y ago
My brand new thinkpad with 16gb ram and a 1080p ips display cost only £670. These specs aren't expensive any more. That being said, my parents are perfectly happy using Google chrome on 2gb ram with a core 2 duo. And that's not with only a few tabs.
- Ezhik 9y ago
  £670 is not "only".
- emptyfile 9y ago
  Not a single person in my office has a laptop that costs over ~400 GBP. It may come as a shock to you but there exists a world outside of California/London/random-tech-hub
- ionised 9y ago
  The average person won't spend that much on a mobile device.
- crtasm 9y ago
  You can't walk into/click onto a high-street store and buy that though, and my assumption is that's where most people buy laptops. £670 is much more than people I know want to spend on a new machine. None of them have ever mentioned screen resolution when i've asked what they want in a laptop.

notafxn 9y ago

I will hope this post is ironic and move on.

dizzystar 9y ago

There's always been a strong impedence between users and developers. Calling a website "Apple first" isn't a compliment. Websites become a problem on slow internet, which is surprisingly common in companies. This is because they are often located in cheap rent areas with little infrastructure.

ant6n 9y ago

> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768 It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users.

nostalgeek 9y ago
> It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users. Because most people making websites don't care about basic usability, even though they have stats that shows their users use small laptops they'll still stick a fixed header that takes 1/5 of screen real estate because it's the latest "bootstrap/material design fad". Google does this a lot, which is ironic with them pushing "AMP" on mobile, they can't even give regular people a good on experience on their laptop.

rb808 9y ago

If you look at Chromebooks, most are 4GB, often 2GB. These are the mainstream new laptops that people will expect to run for 5 years+.

bhauer 9y ago
Yeah, but that link is a Firefox hardware report. How many Firefox users are on Chromebooks?
jethro_tell 9y ago
Think is 'expected to run for <5 years' since the device has 5 years of software support. I find that to be a bit of a bummer, but it's still better than android's 3

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

enitihas 9y ago

I think your experience may be an outlier. Being in an University for the past 4 years, I observed that 90% of the laptops used by the students were 1366*768, and majority were 4GB, followed by 8GB. I don't remember anyone having any problems running the latest chrome or Firefox. I think people even managed to run things like SolidWorks or Matlab perfectly fine on those machines.

PuffinBlue 9y ago
None of the other things surprise me, but that screen resolution does a bit. It's been about 8 years since I last had a laptop without at least 1080p I think.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  Do you buy your laptop for screen real estate or for "small and not too heavy"? Because the latter is what most people buy for, as far as I can tell.
  - PuffinBlue 9y ago
    Those things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive anymore. Something like a Dell 7270 will cost about £275 on eBay. 12 inch screen and 1080p touchscreen. Some question the wisdom of a small screen like that with scaling and whatnot but I've always found it fine.
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      That's fair. Though I wonder how many people buy computers on ebay as opposed to dell.com or amazon.com or an actual brick-and-mortar store. That said, I suspect most people over the age of 35 or so can't read text at "normal" size on a 1080p 12inch screen, so if they want a 12 inch screen they have to either scale up their text or drop the resolution. And I believe the reported resolution in the Firefox telemetry is the one the OS thinks it's using, not the one the hardware has.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago

Endy 9y ago

> * In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now. In 2018, my computer only has 2GB RAM and runs more than fast enough for what I need on a 32-bit processor. I don't understand why some people always want bigger hardware numbers, rather than better software. > * A surprising number of people still have Flash installed. I do too, I don't see how it's abnormal. > I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk? I can barely conceive of how narrow-minded and myopic your technological experience must be that you feel only the latest and "greatest" is viable. As someone who browses the Web regularly, I spend a lot of time on places like HN, YouTube, etc. My screen resolution is 1440x900 - one step above the 1366x768. As I said, 2GB RAM, etc. This is why I've argued, constantly, against the nonsense of Chrome and "modern" Firefox. That's why users of old computers are going to Pale Moon if they know about it, or back to Internet Explorer, or just not upgrading to the newest Firefox. Your technological experience is very much a high-class experience, but you have to understand that there are users all over the world and in all economic positions. All this push toward expecting the best and most modern only works to force out the common person - in America it's the poor person in the ghetto who still is well above the position of people in other, even less prosperous nations. Most people, if they are lucky, have a used <$200 laptop which is often a decade or so old. Library computers are often almost as old - I know two libraries which are still running their .5GB 32-bit Windows NT2000 computers as patron-access machines because they are in poor areas and simply cannot afford to upgrade. People who have the view that everyone should have base access to the latest, greatest, and most wonderful hardware upset me greatly. I have one comment about it that seems constructive. If you think it's so important that they should have this, you should provide it. If you can't give every person who has an old reliable computer (that they can repair) the newest bleeding-edge tech (and give them service when it inevitably breaks), then you need to understand that they have valid concerns too - and help provide better software and help others like you to understand what reality looks like for most of the world.

reaperducer 9y ago

It doesn't surprise me too much. I develop for an organization that serves people of mid-to-lower economic strata. 10% of our users are still on Windows XP. We get caught up in the tech sector echo chamber and don't realize that upgrade cycles for millions of people is a lot slower than we are used to. I think that it's not surprising to see what Firefox is reporting. A lot of people go to Firefox seeking something that runs faster or better than what came with their Windows box years ago. Most of the people we serve on low-end computers are Chrome, not IE/Edge.

bayindirh 9y ago

> In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. Most of the tasks in the real world doesn't need multiple 4K displays, including low level and systems development. Most people read stuff, and as a developer and system administrator, when the text is looking good, this means the resolution is enough. > In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now. 8 GB is more than enough for most people. My family's Win10 desktop is happy with 4GB, my office desktop is cozy with 8GB. My own desktop has 16GB of RAM, but it runs many, albeit small, virtual machines. "The hardware is cheap, let's waste it" mentality doesn't help anyone and it's wrong. I've written some state of the art algorithms which use 1.5MB of RAM and make the CPU scream for cooling (I develop high performance computing software as a side-academic gig), so like every resource, RAM should be used sparingly. Edit: I've no comment for flash. I think it's a forgotten remnant of old systems.

kobrad 9y ago
It's not about needing 4k, it's about the prices. While it's normal in the usa to get a couple of these monitors for me the expense is impossible. And I really would use a 4k monitor. It's a big world, and most of it is not the usa
- bayindirh 9y ago
  Actually, it's not always the price. Serious developers or seasoned computer enthusiasts doesn't change rigs every couple of years. If one's system is performing well enough, and the user gets used to it, system upgrade can be deferred until some technology or computing resource becomes necessary. When something breaks, the broken part is replaced and upgraded in most cases. Personally, I've just upgraded from 1680x1050 to 1920x1080. My old monitor was 10 years old, and was performing relatively well. I bought a new one, because it started to show its age (mostly backlight age).

rogerbinns 9y ago

It is worth contrasting with the Steam survey which covers several million gamers (of varying degrees of dedication) -- http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey Of note, 8GB is most popular with 1920x1080 resolution.

dawnerd 9y ago
Would probably be higher if memory prices weren’t so damn high. Same goes with video resolution. I bet we’ll see a quick bump once video card prices start to drop.
- Endy 9y ago
  Every time we've said "when video card prices start to drop", we've seen about 3 months of drop, and then the companies come out with some new thing that increases the prices yet again.
rndmize 9y ago
Simplified Chinese being the most common language (by far at 52%) threw me for a loop, though it probably shouldn't in this day and age. (For context: English - 23%, Russian - 7.7%, Spanish - 2.8%).
- gruez 9y ago
  That's probably due to the influx of chinese players coming in to play pubg or whatever in the last few months. A more "representative" sample could be found in the months leading up to the spike: https://web.archive.org/web/20170606030609/http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://web.archive.org/web/20170606030609/http://store.stea....

kijin 9y ago

When I bought my father a new laptop a couple of years ago, I specifically looked for a model with 1366x768 resolution because a lot of legacy apps he depends on for his work have terrible HiDPI support. "Upgrading" to 1920x1080 with HiDPI turned off (100% scaling) would have made everything too small for his eyes. Moreover, even apps that do support HiDPI often look like crap at 125% scaling -- the default setting on Windows 10 for most 1920x1080 laptops these days. And if you go up to 150%, you only get 1280x720 effective pixels. That's even less information density than 1366x768. Most legacy Windows apps expect to be able to use at least 768 vertical pixels. The search turned out to be more difficult than I expected, because most high-end PC laptops with good build quality had already transitioned to 1920x1080 by early 2016. I finally found the perfect model for my father and told him that he should expect to use it for a long, long time since it's the last laptop that will ever support his apps. Fortunately, it's a well-built Broadwell i5 with a number of upgradable components, so it should last well into the early 2020s.

ryandrake 9y ago

I think if more developers had to live on 768 line displays, slow CPUs and 4GB RAM, we would have much better performing software.

boomlinde 9y ago

My main home PC is a laptop matching those specs. I frequently use it for development and web browsing. You can comfortably fit two terminals in columns with that resolution. The RAM is mainly an issue when browsing, but killing all the ads and defaulting to no Javascript helps. A surprising amount of websites still only use Javascript for "progressive improvements" i.e. they'll use it just for pop-ups, hijacking scrolling, randomly moving menu bars in and out of view, implement some nonsensical partial loading of the main content etc. but will happily show you the full text without a hassle with a consistent user interface once you turn it off. For a while I used Dillo but that became less viable as an option over time. That said, I do waste a lot less time on shitty websites on this setup.

pmontra 9y ago

Personally I won't touch anything with less than 32 GB and 1080p, but people that use a PC like a tablet with a keyboard and a larger screen have different needs. They are the vast majority of buyers. A friend of mine is thinking about buying a new laptop. We were looking together at what's available in the sub 400 Euro range, basically everything is 4 GB and 1366x768. Add some 200/300 Euro and 8 GB and 1080p start to appear in the lists. Guess what people buy most? The cheapest stuff. By the way, the new laptop must be Windows because anything different will be too difficult to cope with after 30 years of training. He's replacing the old one (only 2 years old) is getting too slow. Probably a malware party but disinfecting that machine it's a hopeless effort. That one and the previous ones were periodically cleaned and/or reinstalled but there is no way to change those ingrained clicking habits. No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. I told him that he'll be back with a slow PC soon and that he's wasting his money, and I've been wasting my time.

distances 9y ago
> No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. This is the weirdest part for me, as I've myself never met a person who'd like to see ads. Installing an adblocker seems to usually be a relevation for people.
gruez 9y ago
>I won't touch anything with less than 32 GB why would you need that much ram? are you running 3+ VMs all the time?
- Joeri 9y ago
  I had to move from 16 to 32 gb when I did hadoop development and needed to run a vm hadoop system locally. It all depends on your workload.
- tekknik 9y ago
  I run 64GB in a mac pro, with about 1/2 of it used as a cache for a zfs volume. With it taking half of my ram along with my other daily apps (safari, sublime text, etc) I’m only left with ~10GB free.

s_kilk 9y ago

> I know many people economize on memory Most just don't have a choice. Plenty of laptop models top out at 8GB,with 16GB either being confined to larger form-factor machines, or being so outrageously expensive that no-one in their right mind would bother. I mean, look at the current line of macbook pros, you simply can't get 16GB without going up to the 15-inch model.

extra88 9y ago

> 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. Could the chart be reporting CSS pixels rather than hardware pixels? Macs are only 7% of total Firefox users but the majority of Mac hardware has a "Retina" display with a higher resolution than these. BTW, 2560x1440 is listed with about ~1% but it's not visible because the line and text is black on a black background.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago
I've been using 2560x1080 for almost a year now and will never go back. 21:9 is the way to go.
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  What size is that? I run a 34" 3440x1440 21:9 and it's nearly a bit too wide. EDIT: https://www.asus.com/us/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/ROG-SWIFT-PG348Q/ https://www.asus.com/us/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/ROG-SWIFT-PG3... 100Hz is awesome, even for just browsing the web.
  - StanislavPetrov 9y ago
    Its 29". I've had many monitors, both bigger and smaller, and this is by far the best I've had for gaming and everything else. Exact model: http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-29UM68-P-ultrawide-monitor http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-29UM68-P-ultrawide-monitor
  - jsgo 9y ago
    I have the same monitor and it is the first time I've started to run Windows apps more in actual windows than full screen/full screen-like. Too many sites waste a bunch of horizontal space on it, so makes sense to shrink the window. Great monitor though. Both for gaming and for general usage.

sandov 9y ago

>disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum My main computer has 8GB RAM. I don't know why I would need more than that. Right now I have firefox with 15 tabs, qt creator and 3 terminals open and I'm only using 2.5 GB of RAM. Unless I suddenly wanted to get into heavy video editing I don't think I'll feel the need to upgrade soon.

Viper007Bond 9y ago
The more RAM you have, the more your OS will use. My 16GB laptop is currently using 8-9GB and I don't have much open. What's the point of RAM if you don't use it? If I get low on free RAM, but OS will discard some unneeded stuff but otherwise it properly uses it as a cache.
- sandov 9y ago
  Almost all operations I command are executed instantly by my computer, so I see no need to use more RAM. I think a good SSD and GPU are much more important than having a lot of RAM if you want to improve general user experience.

lazycouchpotato 9y ago

I have a 1366x768 laptop with 4 GB of RAM.. It's included in the university fees and there's no way of opting out of it, so I had to take it. Not only do they overcharge us for it, finding a seller is hard for it too, so I decided to wipe it clean and use it as my daily driver.

michel-slm 9y ago
Ouch, which university is that? I've heard of universities negotiating deals to get student discounts with certain vendors, and others requiring students (normally in engineering programs) have laptops meeting certain requirements, but this is the first time I hear of students having to purchase underpowered laptops.

squarefoot 9y ago

"I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768." I've used for years a CoreDuo system+4GB with Firefox then PaleMoon playing videos in FullHD on 23 and 27 inches monitors, and never got even close to hit the swap partition unless I was running virtual machines or heavy games. Now I'm on a i5 Debian+XFCE with 8gigs, one Waterfox (privacy oriented Firefox derivative, thanks to the HN user who pointed me at it) instance with 4 tabs opened and a shell with 2 tabs; here's free output: ~$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 8037636 1194044 4182928 187332 2660664 6555172 Swap: 8249340 0 8249340 And this one while watching a 1080p Youtube video at fullscreen. ~$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 8037636 1453204 3761776 280824 2822656 6202520 Swap: 8249340 0 8249340 The operating system probably makes a difference [1], but anyway Firefox runs perfectly on 4 gigs or less. That RAM amount is plenty if well used. [1] ~$ uname -svo Linux #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 (2017-09-19) GNU/Linux (a bit older RT kernel needed for low latency audio)

nikanj 9y ago

I find it extremely sad that us developers really have no idea what our sites are used on. Works great on my iPhone X and iMac Pro? Perfect!

sjapkee 9y ago

There is no real need in 4K resolution, so that's why is's not so popular.

deno 9y ago
People that think they don’t need 4K either haven’t seen a 4K display in person or have poor eyesight. It’s a leap like upgrading from HDD to SDD, in the display world. Unless you just need your monitor for gaming. New gen temporal aliasing mostly makes up for the lack of pixels.
- sjapkee 9y ago
  I have a system with 7200 rpm HDD and system with SSD. Not so much difference. It was a waste of money. Just like 4K display.
  - deno 9y ago
    I don’t believe you. There must be something pathological with your SSD or something else in your system. SSDs have an order of magnitude faster random access performance (both read & write) and you can measure that. NVMe drives additionally increase parallelism by a significant margin. Typical workloads are very sensitive to this metric. At least at cold boot you should see significant improvement in performance. Font rendering, likewise, you can just see[1]. See the full page[2] for more examples. If you have good eyesight, you will see a difference. I could see how 4K to “retina” (>260 PPI) might not be worth paying extra to some (though I personally want the highest PPI I can afford), but 96 PPI to ~185 PPI is a world of difference. It goes from blurry to sharp. That’s not all—because LoDPI text rendering often involves subpixel rendering techniques, HiDPI also brings significant improvement in contrast. For crying out loud, some people even get headaches from the blurry subpixel rendering! [3] [1] https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5.jpg https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5.... [2] https://www.eizo.be/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understanding-pixel-density/ https://www.eizo.be/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understandin... [3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/p7.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/p7.html

Feniks 9y ago

Man I love that bubble you live in ;) You can run win10 on a 15 year old laptop if you want. Hardware and software compatibility has always been MS strength, something nobody can even come close to.

khedoros1 9y ago

> Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk? Yes. The laptop I keep by the TV has 4GB of RAM, a 1366x768 screen, and a quad-core Celeron, that I think is some descendant of one of the Atom families. I tend to keep 10 or fewer tabs open, avoid sites that use really heavy Javascript (well, I do that anyhow...), and usually don't have much else besides a Bash window running. It's got a spinning-rust drive, and swapping would be very obvious. With my usage patterns, it doesn't swap. Performance-wise, it's a fair bit nicer than my phone, at least.

equalunique 9y ago

This surprises me too, but I also must recognize my own inherent bias: The places I have worked in for the past five years all have "enterprise" laptops which are loaded down with all kinds of agents, clients, and background services which just put a silly load on just an idle system. A measly 4GB of RAM would not be enough to run MS Office alongside IE. The screen issue does bug me though. Not just a haxxor feature anymore, all basic Windows users can leverage the split-screen capability to put two applications side by side - on a 720p screen, there really isn't enough screen space to practically do this. I think 1080x1920 or at least 900x1600 should be the standard for 2018.

morganvachon 9y ago

> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. The laptop I'm typing this on is exactly that: A Lenovo Ideapad from 2010 with 4GB and 1366x768 resolution, running Bunsenlabs Linux and the latest Waterfox (Firefox fork with telemetry removed). It's blazing fast even without a SSD; the browser starts in the blink of an eye and it takes nearly 70 tabs open to start slowing down. Yes, the resolution can be limiting for some websites, but most are designed well enough to work fine on it. In fact, on text-heavy sites like HN I find myself browsing at 120% magnification for less eye strain. I couldn't imagine what 1080p or higher on a 15" screen would feel like, but it would likely be painful. It's actually more comfortable to read on than my iPad mini for that reason as well, and of course typing is a dream compared to any other laptop I've used, to say nothing of klunky touchscreen keyboards. Granted, it would be slower with a more bloated Linux distro and certainly was with Windows 7, but when it comes to the OS I prefer minimalist and stable to kitchen sink and bleeding edge.

megy 9y ago

I went back from a macbook pro 16gb to a macbook with 8gb. I do iOS, web, hardware and TV development. I have not had a problem. I can have xcode, eclipse, firefox, safari, mail bbedit and a few other programs running fine.

thefounder 9y ago

How is 16GB bare minimum when it's the max you can get on most laptops?

HugoDaniel 9y ago

640k ought to be enough for everyone

coonery 9y ago

4k is overrated. 27" 1440p is good enough, plus current GPUs are able to push 100+ FPS with such resolution (they fail miserably with 4k resolution).

hypertextcoffee 9y ago
>(they fail miserably with 4k resolution) I use an external GTX 1070 over Thunderbolt 3 on a 2017 Dell XPS 15, and have 2 2160p monitors. 4K gaming is no problem at the refresh rates that 4K offers (usually 60Hz)
- ionised 9y ago
  > 4K gaming is no problem at the refresh rates that 4K offers (usually 60Hz) Subjective. Depends entirely on the settings you are using and the resulting frame rate at that resolution.

Svoka 9y ago

Sounds like April Fools joke/Onion article BREAKING: Bay Area developer discover that California is surrounded by rest of the World.

apolymath 9y ago

Most corporations can’t afford to upgrade hardware and most likely run on very old hardware running windows xp or if they’re lucky, windows 7.