I've been using 16GB Macbooks and Linux PC's for many years and often have 500+ tabs open (going down rabbit holes is how I find new things.) I find todays OS'

I've been using 16GB Macbooks and Linux PC's for many years and often have 500+ tabs open (going down rabbit holes is how I find new things.) I find todays OS's are not really fully debugged for situations like this. I run resource monitors and the RAM, swap, network I/O, disk I/O, GPU, temperature, CPU can all be in normal ranges and yet the computers will suddenly fail due to some hidden resource running out (max # of open files, max user processes, graphics handles, swap error). Browsers always have memory leaks if you use extensions. The OS's do not handle these things gracefully, often slowing down so much that just closing windows takes a very long time and can crash the system. 32GB would let me keep even more tabs open, but it seems likely the OS will not be happy about it without some tuning (which most people would not even have a clue about) but I think it should be the default. RAM has been used as a selling point, just like CPU speed used to be. It doesn't actually cost that much more, it is expensive because it is profitable. The typical amount of RAM in computers has not changed much in a long time. My paranoid suspicion is that part of the reason is that lots of RAM gives all those cores something to actually do, making consumer computers into something actually capable of doing heavy work, which in turn has national security implications. If anyone can run a finite element analysis or train an ML algorithm on a laptop, that gives the whole world a lot of new capability. Keeping the cost high limits what computers can do to only those who can afford it. Disk I/O seems similarly limited (why don't rotating drives use RAID internally across multiple platters to get very high throughput and reliability? 500GB to 1TB is really all the disk anyone needs, just like 10MB used to be?) Along the same lines consumers are discouraged from running servers, so half the usefulness of computers is wasted. But maybe it all really does come down to cost/profit. A multicore CPU that is run flat out, fully fed with data, for long periods of time may require much better cooling than most laptops have.