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There’s no place for expensive laptops with 8GB of RAM anymore
- sitkack 6y ago> Ultimately, though, we all need the laptop makers to be better about configuring their machines. It’s unacceptable to charge $1,000 or more for a laptop with only 8GB of RAM now. The alternative is to stop soldering it to the motherboard so we can upgrade it ourselves, but that’s not going to happen, is it? Machines should be upgradable/repairable, I think the right to repair also means that the end user should be able to decide how much memory a machine has (within bounds of course). How will this work? I don't know. There are at least two instances where I didn't buy a new laptop because the memory system was either hobbled, topped out too soon or was not fully upgradable. I think it is a larger driver of ewaste than people realize and it prevents older machines from being repurposed as easily. Even with soldered ram, it isn't out of the question to get the machine sent off and have the memory upgraded, it just requires the right tooling.
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- yummypaint 6y agoThe fact that new computers are already unfixably obsolete can't be good for business. Whatever they are saving on components and assembly can't be worth it if nobody will buy the machine in the first place.
- darthrupert 6y ago> if nobody will buy the machine in the first place. That's a big if. Apple seems to be hitting homerun after another with their unfixable hardware.
- marcan_42 6y agoSoldered down RAM has real technical advantages. LPDDRx variants of RAM aren't available on DIMMs for this reason. All that modularity means you have ~100 very high speed digital signals running across a board and several connectors. That takes power, due to the physics involved. It doesn't matter for computers plugged into a wall or for gamer laptops, but it matters in the mid and ultraportable segment if you want decent battery life. Soldering RAM down right next to the CPU or on top of it (as is done in SoC style laptops) lets you use narrower, faster buses at lower voltage swing and lower power (LPDDR4X operates at half the I/O voltage of DDR4). Now soldered down SSDs, yeah, unless you're building a thin phone with no space for a connector, there's no excuse for that. PCIe works perfectly fine across a connector.
- titzer 6y agoWhat is the contribution of the bus to overall power consumption vs the CPU and DRAM chips themselves, let alone the screen? I find it hard to believe that that is really an important design consideration leading to soldered-in RAM. I had a Lenovo Stinkpad Carbon X1. The soldered-in RAM started to fail, causing memory corruption. That machine is now a brick, and I am still pissed off about it. Modular RAM is fixable RAM.
- ghaff 6y agoYes to this. Me: I want a easily upgradable, swappable computer. Also me: I want a fast 2 pound laptop with great battery life. That said, I had to put a new battery in a 17" gaming laptop a while back. It's a huge machine and there was zero excuse for the battery not be easily swappable.
- chx 6y agoBut then you have Lenovo who only ships 32GB with the latest X1 Carbon if you also choose an i7 CPU...
- Const-me 6y ago> it matters in the mid and ultraportable segment if you want decent battery life. Memory buses consume very little power compared to the rest of the components. Even memory itself doesn’t consume much, except VRAM in high-end GPUs but that’s an order of magnitude faster than system RAM in most computers. Battery impact of soldered versus socketed RAM is negligible. For instance, HP ProBook 445 G7 and G8 have two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, yet the battery life is up to 14 hours. Computers with soldered RAM are slightly cheaper to manufacture (less parts). Also, it’s not user-upgradeable, users are likely to replace the complete computer after a few years. Memory and disk requirements of software grows quickly over time: https://techtalk.pcmatic.com/research-charts-memory/ https://techtalk.pcmatic.com/research-charts-memory/ These two factors create incentives for computer manufacturers to solder the RAM, despite that’s not in the interests of users, and the environment.
- schmorptron 6y agoThe framework laptop might be right up your alley!
- huachimingo 6y agoRead "Tools for conviventiality", by Ivan Illich. It inspired one of the makers of the first Personal Computer.
- astrange 6y agoThis article is based on watching Task Manager which I can't imagine is an accurate picture of how much RAM you "need". There is no reason to care about your machine swapping sometimes as long as it's subjectively performing well. > Laptop makers buying RAM in bulk will always get it at a lower price than you or I would by going to Amazon. This is not true if you bump the RAM amount in every machine you sell and end up using the world's supply of cheap RAM up. Build to order doesn't have that risk since most people won't do it.
- vondur 6y agoI assume that Windows can manage RAM effectively, but 6-7 GB of RAM used at startup seems like something is wrong.
- MomoXenosaga 6y agoI'm on a €350 phone that has 8GB of RAM.
- raizinho 6y agoWhich phone is that?
- angrais 6y agoNot OP but I have a OnePlus6 with 8GB RAM and never have had any issues with it. I've had it since it's release.
- MomoXenosaga 6y agoPOCO. I think Chinese manufacturers have realised they will never be "cool" enough to have insane profit margins.
- jollybean 6y agoThe author is talking value, the PM's are talking pricing strategy. 8G is under-powered, thee point is to anchor a price and to get you to pay more. Sadly, especially with Macs which are not upgradable.
- k__ 6y agoI have a MBP with 8GB and a PC with 32GB. In my daily work with many web apps, 8GB is certainly not enough. But as long as I don't run Photoshop or Premiere, 32GB isn't needed either. Usually my memory usage is around 10-12GB.
- towb 6y agoAbout the same for me... 8 gb was often too little even 10 years ago but for what I do these days 16 is always more than enough.
- gregoriol 6y ago16 not enough here: I'm closer to 20-24 because mostly of lots of browser tabs and switching between projects, rarely because of heavy stuff. 32 would be comfortable today, and 64 would be future-proof (my 16GB is 6 years old now and I plan to keep the next one as long!).
- towb 6y agoAlright, I have ~120 browser tabs open in FF but most are hibernated. Sometimes I open a lot of tabs in another browser for... ehm... other reasons... Never a problem. And no loading of huge projects in vim. MBP 16" At least we can agree that 8 isn't enough :D
- k__ 6y agoI'm closing my tabs rather often. I'm getting the heebie-jeebies when I have too many open.
- minimaxir 6y agoMy iMac w/ 32GB of RAM hovers at 50% and never goes higher even when doing more intensive tasks.
- mcny 6y agoHow do you do it? Do you have a Sql server, MySQL, or postgresql instance running on your machine? Do you aggressively limit how much memory these servers can use?
- nindalf 6y agoInterestingly, the latest Macbook Air has only 8GB of RAM. I've used it about 3 months now and haven't felt any issue with perf. I don't think my experience would have been any different with extra RAM.
- walshemj 6y agoDepends what you using it for I regularly get thrashing on my works 16gb dell and that's without any vms running and not using the full office suite. If your a journalist tapping out a column and only using one application at a time yes 8gb will work for you.
- marcinzm 6y agoIn my anecdotal experience Windows/PCs require decently more ram than OSX/Macs for the same perceived performance. My Macbooks were always fine with 16gb but I had to upgrade my Windows machine to 32gb despite using the Macbooks for much more involved workloads.
- nindalf 6y agoI'm not a journalist. Compiling with npm, cargo, go - all of it works well. Also run Chrome in the background. But on this particular laptop, others have run video processing/other compute/memory intensive tasks and it's held up well.
- dawnerd 6y agoThat’s probably because the storage is fast enough you can’t really tell when it swaps.
- armincerf 6y agoI have been using the base model 8gb m1 Mac mini as my main work machine since it came out, the only time I have noticed a ram limitation was when I ran out of storage space and it couldn’t swap anymore. Pretty amazing since this computer cost $2000 less than my 2019 MacBook Pro and is noticeably faster (Clojure development and some hobby music production) Maybe I’ll regret it in a few years if the ssd dies due to the extra load though… I do really wish the storage was easier to change
- failwhaleshark 6y agoI want a laptop with 64 or 128 GiB of Chipkill ECC RAM. Any of this soldered-on, anti-R2R/-consumer Apple trend-copying is BS. This crap about "YAGNI" or "it costs too much" have no idea what they're talking about and don't understand the reasons or use-cases. At home, I may have a 96 core EPYC with 512 GiB of Reg'd ECC RAM, but it doesn't have the locality or reachability of something that's with you. Network presence and low-latency aren't a given. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipkill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipkill Edit: Resources: https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory https://tedium.co/2021/01/06/error-correcting-code-memory-history/ https://tedium.co/2021/01/06/error-correcting-code-memory-hi... [PDF] https://defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Schultz/DEFCON-21-Schultz-Examining-the-Bitsquatting-Attack-Surface-WP.pdf https://defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Schu... DEFCON 19: Bit-squatting: DNS Hijacking Without Exploitation (trivia: at the time of filming, I was excessively-hungover and laying across 6 seats in the middle of an empty area to the extreme right, from the podium's perspective. I did watch the presentation with sunglasses on indoors because my eyes weren't cooperating nicely with photons.) https://youtu.be/aT7mnSstKGs https://youtu.be/aT7mnSstKGs Edit follow-on: And I don't want to lug-around a 17" Russian tank laptop that needs wheeled tracks to move. 13-15" max.
- throw_m239339 6y ago> What’s actually using all that? Background processes from first and third-party software and from Windows 10 itself. When you click the cross to close Discord, for example, it doesn’t actually close. It operates in the background and doing so requires using system resources. I think Discord, Skype, Telegram and co are made with electron thus the memory issues. Great for iterating, horrible for cheap laptops. The article itself isn't really interesting though, because not really technical as to what the issue is exactly.
- exciteabletom 6y agoTelegram runs on qt: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop#third-party https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop#third-party
- kitsunesoba 6y agoOr optionally on Cocoa and UWP, which are even more “native” on their respective platforms: https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift/ https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift/ https://github.com/UnigramDev/Unigram https://github.com/UnigramDev/Unigram I’m a huge fan of Telegram’s model of releasing a cross-platform core for the community to build their own clients on top of. I wish all chat apps followed its lead.
- weird-eye-issue 6y agoI installed Discord recently on a new laptop and first thing I did was turn off that behavior. I already have the option to minimize it
- syshum 6y agoOne of the things that would go along way to address this is Open Protocols or Open API's Go back to the days where you could have 1 client and connect to ICQ, AIM, GChat, etc etc etc all in 1 program People should not need to have Skype, Teams, Telgram, Discord and Slack all running on their computers at the same time
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- Alosra 6y agoThis is all based on windows. I use kubuntu, 20.04. have 12 GB of ram and right now with total of 222 processes, firefox and clementine open, I use less than 2 GB of ram. so, no, not if you want to run some decent linux, but hey if you wanna run windows.
- mrweasel 6y agoI won’t argue that many won’t need 16GB of RAM, because I don’t know what people use their laptop for. I will argue that if you need 16GB because a chat application and a browser already pushes the system above 8GB, then something in the software is broken. Some wrote on their blog, sorry don’t remember who, if Electron apps (which I assume the Telegram client is) uses to many resources, then don’t argue that it should be a native application, instead ask if we can make Electron more efficient. That’s a smart idea.
- yunohn 6y agoHow many Firefox tabs do you have open? Any other apps at all? 2GB is way too low.
- kevingadd 6y agoJust the GPU surfaces for hardware acceleration will use a ton of memory. If your GPU has dedicated VRAM you might be OK, but often there needs to be a CPU-side buffer for the data as well.
- Der_Einzige 6y agoKubuntu with "Plazma" was the most RAM I have ever seen a Linux distro take at idle. Xubuntu was a breath of fresh air in comparison and had far fewer weird UI bugs. I don't recommend kubuntu for resource constrained systems.
- zamalek 6y agoRAM/resource usage has been steadily decreasing for Plasma for a while, and has basically reached XFCE levels, so I suspect your information may be out of date. On my system it's currently using 250MB. Xubuntu is a great DE recommendation, though.
- zokier 6y agoI was taking a peek what Dell as an example has currently in market. The most ridiculous configuration maybe is this "Precision 3560" in its baseline configuration, which includes latest generation Core i5 CPU paired with 4 GB of RAM, with almost $1200 pricetag. I feel sorry for anyone who buys that.. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certified/new-precision-3560-workstation/spd/precision-15-3560-laptop/xctop356015us_vivp https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif... There are other silly examples too, like this $1400 XPS 13 that has non-configurable 8 GB of RAM together with latest gen i7: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-laptop/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/smx139w10p2c1200p https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo... I would agree that this skimping on RAM is pretty ridiculous. I can understand if some <$500 laptops still would ship with 8 GB, nobody should expect any greatness from those, but for devices costing three times more the expectations are higher. Heck, my main PC is i5 (so mid-range) from 2015 and even it has 16 GB of RAM.
- gruez 6y ago> The most ridiculous configuration maybe is this "Precision 3560" in its baseline configuration, which includes latest generation Core i5 CPU paired with 4 GB of RAM, with almost $1200 pricetag. I feel sorry for anyone who buys that.. Or maybe they're being smart by adding RAM themselves rather than paying dell an overpriced markup?
- ivegotnoaccount 6y agoWell, in this case, they both get to install the RAM themselves and to pay for an even more overpriced markup.
- gruez 6y ago1. Better to pay a $200 markup than a $400 markup right? 2. the markup is often warranted. There's a vast difference between "business" laptops and "consumer" laptops. I can't speak for dell's precision line, but lenovo's thinkpads are leagues better (build quality, support, etc) than the consumer crap you get at best buy.
- secondcoming 6y agoWhen I reluctantly had to buy a laptop due to covid I opted for a Dell Precision 7750. I bought the minimum 8GB from Dell and put 128GB in it myself with cheaper after-market RAM,and changed the thermal paste. It's a beast. Unfortunately Dell weren't offering any Ryzen CPUs
- yunohn 6y agoI’m super curious what you’re doing with 128GB RAM on a laptop!
- AdrianB1 6y ago2 of my colleagues run SQL on their laptops; I have a lower spec laptop, so I run it on a desktop with 128 GB of RAM. Not something many people do, but 3 in my team of 8 do it.
- goatinaboat 6y ago2 of my colleagues run SQL on their laptops; I have a lower spec laptop, so I run it on a desktop with 128 GB of RAM If you are a developer you absolutely do not need 128GB of RAM to run SQL Server! But if it convinces your management to buy you top spec kit, fair play to you.
- AdrianB1 6y agoThey are developers, I am the manager, so they do more SQL work than me. Some of the databases we work with are over 1TB, a lot of RAM is needed to run queries fast (in memory). I prefer a good desktop any day to a half-baked laptop that is thermal constrained.
- goatinaboat 6y agoI prefer a good desktop any day to a half-baked laptop that is thermal constrained. Agree with you there, while a 1T database is possible on a laptop I wouldn’t want to use it for real work!
- zanethomas 6y agoSuch a generalization cannot possibly be taken seriously. The amount of RAM one requires varies with how the machine is used and even how often; a slow machine once in a while is less annoying than a machine that's slow all day every day. I can't use an 8gb laptop because 1 vm or too many open browser tabs along with an app or two based in electron and after some time the thrashing commences. My daughter is perfectly happy with the 8gb laptop I gave here. Kind of wish I could put half of that in my laptop. <g>
- thealistra 6y agoIt seems like the author doesn’t understand how the OS manages memory. It is good to have a lot of memory used. You don’t get your money back for the RAM you save. The only worthwile metric is how fast stuff actually runs/noticable wait times on swapping, etc The OS uses the ram as this makes running tasks faster. No point in keeping it free.
- orangepanda 6y ago> It is good to have a lot of memory used. You don’t get your money back for the RAM you save. Only when looking at a system as a whole. Individual applications should still use as little RAM as possible; some people run more than just slack.
- gruez 6y ago>The OS uses the ram as this makes running tasks faster. No point in keeping it free. this meme[1] needs to die. windows, mac, and linux (htop) all correctly differentiate between "used but used for cache" RAM and "used for application" RAM. When people are talking about not having enough free ram, they're talking about chrome, spotify, and slack taking up 2GB each, not the output of "free" showing only 8MB free. [1] https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
- zozbot234 6y agoIn most OS's, all available RAM is automatically used as a file cache, and is not considered "used" in system load stats. Available RAM is absolutely not "wasted", and tasks which use more RAM actually make the system slower since memory bandwidth is the likeliest bottleneck in modern systems.
- periheli0n 6y agoThese were my thoughts, too. Most RAM these days goes into caching apps and files that might be needed. Inverse swapping of sorts. Is it possible that the problem is worse on Windows because of the DLL zoo, with each app shipping its own, whereas the Mac makes heavier use of shared Frameworks?
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- chiefalchemist 6y agoIf the RAM can't be expanded then 16 should be the min. If there's an open slot that'll accept 8 or more then fine, start with 8. But today's 8 soldered is tomorrow underpowered landfill fodder. It's irresponsible to intentionally manufacture technology that's that disposable.
- tompazourek 6y agoI sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be better with some regulation regarding this. I'm not sure. But it kind of goes hand in hand with the whole repairability thing. And unrepairable devices have more externalities...
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- kevingadd 6y agoI'm not sure about the claim that Win10 itself uses a bunch of memory. On my machine with lots of stuff installed, almost all of the "Microsoft Corporation" processes running are lightweight in the 2-10mb range. Many of them could be evicted or swapped out. A few of the heavy ones are suspended UWP apps, which the OS will kick out if memory is limited. The three outliers are MsMpEng (windows defender AV), SearchIndexer, and Explorer. The last one makes sense given how much stuff it's tracking (all my open windows, my open folder views, tray icons, etc) though I feel like it should definitely be lighter. SearchIndexer and MsMpEng use a ton of RAM and I don't know why, that feels inexcusable. Maybe it's mostly cache pages that are reported wrong and will be evicted if memory is low? Out of all of those, though, they predate win10 by a while. The same stuff would've been running on 7. So I'm not sure that things have gotten worse - I suspect it's all about the third-party software installed on the machine, and people have tons of third-party software installed now. (And if you need to, you can disable Defender and SearchIndexer. Maybe you should.) In the end most of my memory is going to third-party software (Firefox, qBitTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, LINE - all 400mb or more) or optional services I have turned on (Windows Update's "delivery optimization" will sometimes chew up a bunch of RAM if you have updates waiting to install - it seems to be caching them in memory to distribute them to other machines on your network. I wouldn't be surprised if this will get thrown out in limited memory scenarios, but make sure it's turned off!) Every Electron app you have open is probably 400+mb on Windows at best, and often worse. (Electron on mac uses different APIs, which may help?) Maybe the reason all these new M1 laptops feel great with 8gb of RAM is that mac users don't need to install as much third-party software, and Electron apps use less memory on OS X? I don't think most macs have a virus scanner installed, for example.
- daviddever23box 6y ago8 GB of soldered-down RAM on an Intel- or AMD-based Windows 10 laptop is a cost-cutting measure, though it's plenty for most Linux distros as a daily driver. Don't be Poor(TM), spend the money on 16GB (or with a manufacturer that offers you that at a reasonable price). Apple M1-based laptops are fine with 8 GB; it's an, errm, Apples to oranges comparison.
- ByteWelder 6y agoIn reality, I believe we're being let down by software developers who consider hardware resources like RAM and CPU as a free and unlimited resource. This includes web development. Electron apps like Discord/Slack/MatterMost/VSCode/etc. are a good example of this. Or Windows 10 versus Linux (or even macOS).
- carlio 6y agoThis comes partly from the cloud-centric approach of "just scale up" instead of trying to optimise code. Lots of developers just want to throw more CPU/RAM at their inefficient code because "it's cheaper than the developer time to fix it" which is sort of true up to a point, until you have to hire a contractor to come in and reduce your AWS/GCP bill so you don't go out of business.
- ivanmontillam 6y agoAs a statement I spent almost the cost of a new car for being able to afford these kind of Electron apps. I greatly dislike Electron, but since almost everyone is forcing that on us, I, as a protestor, got top-of the line hardware. I got 128 Gb of RAM, i9-9880H, SSD NVME2, and a Quadro RTX 4000 8Gb, on a mobile workstation. Let's see how much time left until Electron apps catch up in bloat.
- testesttest 6y agoA long time. You just have to stay ahead of the Mac as that seems to be what all the heavy electron apps are developed on these days. My problem has always been smart phones because I refuse to drop $500+ dollars every 2 years as apps get hungrier
- schmorptron 6y agoYep. 6 GB of ram on a phone should be plenty for anything you can throw at it, but even that seems to be a lower midrange spec today.
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- cultofmetatron 6y agoMeanwhile I'm playing with a pinebook pro. Comically underpowered arm processor and only 4 gigs of ram. The stock manjuro installation is fast enough and I've been able to to get started with OS development on it.
- asd4232 6y agoI think buying new expensive laptops for personal use is waste of money anyway, unless you do something like heavy video editing or gaming where you really need the power. For my daily use (programming hobby projects, studying, browsing) a 10-year old Thinkpad T520 with i7 is more than adequate after upgrading it with SSD and 16GB of RAM, especially when using Linux instead of Windows.
- AdrianB1 6y agoIf you do something really intensive on CPU and/or RAM, use a desktop instead of a laptop, the expandability and thermals are much better. And 10 year old CPU is very slow and inefficient by modern standards.
- rakoo 6y ago"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" Instead of asking software vendors to make better apps, we ask hardware vendors to put more RAM. Instead of asking an industry that can distribute the change in months, we ask the industry that will take years to change the entirety of the installed base. Instead of asking for higher efficiency and better use of resources we already have, we accept bloat as a natural fact of life and accommodate to that. Instead of maximizing the use of all the resources we have already mined and the energy we have already used, the devices that are functional but slow when used with bloated software, we encourage active obscolecence and further pollution of our environment, exploitation of resources in dubious onditions, more-than-grey working conditions, all in the name of "it is possible to do more, so we should do more". Is this really the direction we want ?
- cuddlecake 6y agoYes
- tracer4201 6y ago> we accept bloat as a natural fact of life and accommodate to that I don’t disagree with your post, but what is the solution here? Your average consumer likely doesn’t understand the specific role of computer RAM, nor do they understand that software they’re using excessively wastes it. How can they accept or reject something they don’t know? And it’s a similar problem with many developers. They don’t think about memory, or they view it as some infinite resource pool. I see folks often times using complex “frameworks” to solve trivial problems. They merely wanted to 2 + 2, but that framework has a dependency graph for solving systems of equations and partial derivatives. Democratization of tech and programming has resulted in a lot of inefficiencies. I mean - that’s the cost, right? > we encourage active obscolecence and further pollution of our environment I don’t think your typical consumer encourages this at all. Between their jobs, families, and all the stress of day to day life, Im not convinced they even have time to think about these things.
- alephnan 6y agoApple’s wall garden somewhat curates a high quality set of apps
- johnklos 6y agoTechRadar is a shitty kind of site. First, their site takes 100% of CPU whenever possible, along with 1/2 a gig of memory if you leave it open for more than a few minutes, as if to prove the point of the article. They talk about technical things incorrectly, and I'm sure they'd say, "Well, we just want to appeal to regular people" instead of admitting they're not trying. Their statement that that laptop makers will get more of a discount buying in bulk isn't false, but it's not really the issue. If laptop base models came with 16 gigs, the associated memory markup will still be there, yet they suggest otherwise as if the market somehow would rather help people than make money. As far as the article goes, they discuss the symptoms of the larger problem, but not the problem itself - our apps, particularly browsers, use too much memory, and nobody is talking about ways to punish app makers and web sites that abuse this.
- AdrianB1 6y agoThere is a place for anything. My wife uses for work an older 4GB Surface Pro; my father is also using a laptop with 4 GB of RAM. I am using the company provided laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a desktop with 128GB of RAM (>75% used most of the time); my daughter is using a laptop with 16 GB of RAM and my son a desktop with 32 GB of RAM. All run Windows 10. All of us have different needs and usage patterns, me being the extreme where the laptop is a portable email and light work tool and the desktop is the workhorse, my daughter using the laptop at school and my son only at home, so that's why he has a desktop. I am not making a case for 4GB of RAM, but 8GB is a enough for many people that don't use crappy apps or don't have special needs. Oh, and my main development VM has 8GB of RAM; I can give it more, but I never used more than 5 or 6. Expensive laptops is a very relative term and judging the value of an expensive laptop on the amount of RAM is dodgy; I expect build quality, great lifetime (my wife's Surface Pro 3 has 6-7 years of flawless operation), low weight, good screen - I don't have RAM in that list. Yes, if you need more RAM you buy a model with more RAM, but if you don't need it then you don't buy it, it is that simple for me - I agree others may see it differently.
- boyadjian 6y agoTotally agree, but that's not new, makers have always sold laptops with not enough RAM. Two years ago, I extended the 8GB RAM of my Lenovo E330, to 16GB, and now I can keep it several years more. Buying a desktop or laptop PC with only 8 GB RAM is a nonsense nowadays, but unfortunately, few people are aware of that. And if you build a brand new gaming computer, you have to put 32GB of RAM, if you want to keep it many years
- vbezhenar 6y agoHa-ha, I just bought Dell 3410 with 4GB of RAM. Of course I upgraded it to 16GB and I'm considering upgrading it to 32GB in a few years if necessary. 8 GB is not that bad. I would consider using 8 GB if not for virtual machines, but that's hardly an ordinary user use-case.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThis is so true. My work is cheaping out on laptops and also the vendor they buy MacBooks from only wants to do off the shelf SKUs and not CTO (Configure To Order). So due to Apple's crazy low base RAM I have a MacBook Pro 2019 with 8GB RAM. Literally every day I get this panicy popup saying I MUST close something or the system will reboot. Often I get random crashes. The "Memory Pressure" in activity monitor is almost always red. I don't know how Apple can advocate selling a "Pro" system with only 8GB RAM while making the mandatory upgrade to 16 really expensive and difficult (much longer leadtime on CTO models).
- pindab0ter 6y agoI’ve literally not once got one of those pop-ups you described on my 8GB 2015 MBP. Not saying your point is invalid, just saying there’s a lot of professionals that don’t require more 8GB of RAM.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoStrange enough it's mainly Outlook that seems crazy memory hungry. Usually it's using about 3GB by itself alone. I've taken to using the web version a lot but it's not ideal. Another big memory hog is Firefox. I don't use Safari because macOS isn't the only platform I use. But you buy a computer for more than just today.
- astrange 6y agoYou are either out of disk space or something is using all swap space (~64GB).
- GekkePrutser 5y agoTrue, I have very little free disk space too. Because my work also cheaped out on storage with the 128GB model. XCode alone is 30GB and Outlook takes up about 20 as it downloads my entire mail library by default (and there seems to be no way to tell it to just sync the last 2 months and keep the rest on the server).
- jeffbee 6y agoWhat this person is suggesting is that the everyone should have to spend another $100 and get worse battery life because the author has an irrational preference for inefficient software. My Pixelbook Go has never once exhibited symptoms of memory pressure, cost $800, runs all day, and I prefer it that way.
- asimpletune 6y agoSoftware, aka Chrome, is at least partially to blame.
- tompazourek 6y agoIf I were pointing fingers, I would point more to React, NPM, webpack, and just the crazy world of frontend development in general. But yeah, a browser is almost like a second OS running on the machine. Only it's built at a higher level (abstraction-wise) with much less focus on optimizing resource usage compared to a proper OS.
- indymike 6y agoMy wish list for a reasonably priced laptop: 16GB of RAM, a GPU that can at least play a game or too, and a decent (> 1080p) LCD panel. Seems like the line is at about $1,200 for this..
- tompazourek 6y agoIt also would be nice to be able to upgrade to 32 GB maybe few years into the future. Upgrading an older machine when needed is so much better than buying new ones all the time. I wish more HW would be built with upgradability/repairability in mind.
- scarface74 6y agoI had an old Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB of RAM from 2010 that I used mostly as a Plex server until 2019 running Windows 10 - with a spinning hard drive. I was surprised it ran at all. Let alone decently enough to run any one of Chrome, Word, or Excel. I would use it every now and then when I was working from home while interviewing.
- periheli0n 6y agoHow much of RAM is actually full vs just cached stuff that can be purged when memory pressure increases? Just because Windows task manager says 10 GB RAM are used doesn’t mean it could easily do with half of it, just foregoing a bit of preloading of apps/files that you might perhaps be using.
- ksec 6y agoIt has to do with cost more than anything else. Look at the performance per dollar on CPU, even with slower improvement rate on node and IPC, the compound performance added up over time if still significant. For DRAM, especially when we moved to LPDDR, the price floor of dollar per GB hasn't moved at all over the past 10 years. This is a challenge when vendors' profit margin are constantly being squeezed. > It’s unacceptable to charge $1,000 or more for a laptop with only 8GB of RAM now. Consider Apple has their entry level laptop at $999. And most chrome book at below $400 are absolutely junk. I would rate $999 as high medium tier.
- stadium 6y agoI've been experimenting with throwaway ec2 dev boxes. My environment setups are scripted for setting up a new instance but I usually stop and restart the same one. The instance shuts itself off using a cloudwatch alarm after 5 minutes of idle time. My IDE is vscode using remote connections, and a ssh client. Startup time is less than 20 seconds and I scripted that too. Cost: about $0.15 for a few hours of work. Less vscode, it will work from any hardware built withing the last 10-15 years that has a ssh client. Edit: that has a ssh client (not just a Linux terminal)
- hyperpl 6y agoI don't see any issue with 8GB of RAM especially if it's priced accordingly. Not everyone needs 16GB+ of RAM. My 32GB desktop has rarely used more than 8GB of RAM under any of my workloads. Running ArchLinux x86_64 with kernel 5.12, 2 firefox instances, qemu w/ Debian x86_64, multiple xterms w/ vim, ncmpcpp, mpd, sshd: total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 32031 1552 26992 204 3485 29816 Swap: 0 0 0 I would prefer to see them drop unnecessary features like webcam, fingerprint readers, face detection, etc...
- MiddleEndian 6y agoI feel similarly ripped off by expensive laptops with small hard drives. It would have been $800 more for a 1TB 15" Surface Book 2 than a 256GB 15" Surface Book 2 with otherwise identical specs. A 1TB hard drive is like $100. But you can't really swap the hard drive without peeling the screen off. The hard drive size price issue is basically the same for the Surface Book 3, several years later. I like the design of the laptop but I won't be getting another one.
- tompazourek 6y agoSounds like they're copying what Apple is doing with the iPhones and their multiple storage sizes.
- MiddleEndian 6y agoI've always considered the Surface Book line to be Microsoft's answer to Apple's Macbook Pro, and design-wise, it's a pretty good one. Detachable tablets with a real operating system and a dedicated GPU base are kind of the ultimate form factor (unless they could fit that GPU into the tablet). But the specs fall short. Macbook Pro hard drives start at 512GB and go up to 8TB, and they have more ram at the high end as well. It's just annoying and I'm probably just going to try to build my own laptop in a year or two.
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- juancn 6y agoJavascript needs copious amounts of ram when wielded by close to average developers. Since we cannot inflict the pain on the ones that have the most tools to do something about it, end users end up paying for the inefficiency.
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- Markoff 5y agoI don't think author of this piece understands how RAM works in Windows 10 or modern app nowadays, having allocated RAM and actually using it are two very different things while in past 2GB RAM after launch of Windows seemed fixed regardless of how much RAM you have, nowadays, Windows will just take large portion of RAM regardless of whether you have 4, 8, 16 or 32, it's not fixed number and it's not required number for instance I am running Windows 10 on laptop with 8GB RAM and I have currently available 3GB RAM with Edge and other app I use for work consuming combined 1.5-2GB RAM, so by author's logic Windows takes less than 3GB in total
- noxer 5y ago>As I sit here writing this I have two apps actually open in the foreground on my PC; Firefox and Telegram Desktop. And according to Task Manager, I’m using 55% of my available memory. Author has a severe misunderstanding about how RAM is "used" actually allocated. The exact same system he has but with 8GB RAM would probably be at 70-80% ram usage or so. The reason why he reaches 8GB+ on his machines so fast is because he has 16GB. Nothing is more useless than empty RAM (in a PC at least). The OS does and should use as much ram as possible if there is plenty RAM left. The system is fast if the RAM is used not if it is free.