first of all, you are definitely right that it is silly to pay $200 more when all you care about is the extra 4GB ram. if i were in that position, i would buy t

first of all, you are definitely right that it is silly to pay $200 more when all you care about is the extra 4GB ram. if i were in that position, i would buy the 4GB laptop and immediately upgrade the ram. the problem is that not everyone is comfortable upgrading ram themselves, and many modern ultraportables have the ram soldered in anyway. 4GB is honestly okay as a bare minimum for 2018, but it will rapidly become the system bottleneck in the coming years. > why do basic computers need 8gb these days? Tablets do about the same workload, but only need 3-4gb max... mobile software is still designed pretty differently than its desktop/laptop counterparts. take the browser for instance, probably the most widely used software by light users. while i type this post, firefox is taking up over 1GB just to have five tabs open, and it seems to use 100-200 MB more for each additional tab. that's a lot of memory, but the upside is that each tab is fully loaded in memory and can be switched to in an instant. on my phone, firefox uses way less memory, but only the current tab (or maybe a couple recently viewed ones) is actually loaded in memory. switching tabs on mobile triggers a page reload from disk or over the network, orders of magnitude slower than the desktop experience. certainly there are some lazy devs out there that waste our memory, but at the core there is a intrinsic tradeoff between memory usage and performace. it's always faster to load from memory than to read from storage. i doubt you would want to trade desktop/laptop class performance for mobile class memory footprint on your main device.