Someone who only cares about Word, YouTube and browsing Facebook also doesn't need a $1,600 laptop with an 8-core CPU and a chunky GPU, they could get by with s

Someone who only cares about Word, YouTube and browsing Facebook also doesn't need a $1,600 laptop with an 8-core CPU and a chunky GPU, they could get by with something much less powerful and probably wouldn't even notice the difference - and if anything, having only 8 GB of RAM is more likely to cause performance problems than not having a fast CPU or GPU (the modern web and modern apps are pretty memory hungry especially if you open a lot of tabs).