4 ms·

For last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower

• linguae 10mo ago
  I wonder what we can do to preserve personal computing, where users, not vendors, control their computers? I’m tired of the control Microsoft, Apple, Google, OpenAI, and some other big players have over the entire industry. The software has increasingly become enshittified, and now we’re about to be priced out of hardware upgrades. The problem is coming up with a viable business model for providing hardware and software that respect users’ ability to shape their environments as they choose. I love free, open-source software, but how do developers make a living, especially if they don’t want to be funded by Big Tech?
  • Saris 10mo ago
    Run a lightweight Linux distro on older hardware maybe?
    • ta9000 10mo ago
      This is it. Buy used Dell and HP hardware with 32 GB of RAM and swap the pcie ssd for 4 TB.
      • dartharva 10mo ago
        No, this is not it. It only worked when there were a small number of buyers for used hardware, who were largely enthusiasts. The moment it becomes mainstream you're going to face the same scarcity in the used/refurbished market as well.
        • intrasight 10mo ago
          There are lots of such computers to be repurposed. It'll relieve price pressure and avoid e-waste.
    • thatguy0900 10mo ago
      Exclusively using a ever dwindling stock of old hardware is not really a practical solution to preserving hardware rights in the long term
      • jjgreen 10mo ago
        The future is ragged shoeless and grimy humans fighting over the last few 1990's pocket calculators.
• zahlman 10mo ago
  I'm reading this thread on an 11-year-old desktop with 8GB of RAM and not feeling any particular reason to upgrade, although I've priced it out a few times just to see. Mint 22.x doesn't appear to be demanding any more of my machine than Mint 20.x. Neither is Firefox or most websites, although YouTube chat still leaks memory horrendously. (Of course, download sizes have increased.)
  • callc 10mo ago
    Mint is probably around 0.05% of desktop/laptop users. I think root comment is looking at the overall picture of what all customers can get for their money, and see it getting worse. This wasn’t mentioned, but it’s a new thing for everyone to experience, since the general trend of computer hardware is it gets cheaper and more powerful over time. Maybe not exponentially any more, but at least linearly cheaper and more powerful.
    • OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
      > I think root comment is looking at the overall picture of what all customers can get for their money, and see it getting worse. A $999 MacBook Air today is vastly better than the same $999 MacBook Air 5 years ago (and even more so once you count inflation).
      • chii 10mo ago
        The OP is not looking at the static point (of the price of that item), but the trend - ala, the derivative of the price vs quality. It was on a steep upward incline, and now it's flattening.
  • Groxx 10mo ago
    I've been enjoying running Mint on my terrible spec chromebook - it only has 3GB of RAM, but it rarely exceeds 2GB used with random additions and heavy firefox use. The battery life is obscenely good too, I easily break 20 hours on it as long as I'm not doing something obviously taxing. Modern software is fine for the most part. People look at browsers using tens of gigabytes on systems with 32GB+ and complain about waste rather than being thrilled that it's doing a fantastic job caching stuff to run quickly.
• deadbabe 10mo ago
  I think it will be a good thing actually. Engineers, no longer having the luxury of assuming that users have high end system specs, will be forced to actually write fast and efficient software. No more bloated programs eating up RAM for no reason.
  • Insanity 10mo ago
    I'm not optimistic that this would be the outcome. You likely will just have poor running software instead. After all, a significant part of the world is already running lower powered devices on terrible connection speeds (such as many parts of Africa).
    • chii 10mo ago
      > a significant part of the world is already running lower powered devices but you cannot consider this in isolation. The developed markets have vastly higher spending consumers, which means companies cater to those higher spending customers proportionately more (as profits demand it). Therefore, the implication is that lower spending markets gets less investment and less catered to; after all, R&D spending is still a limiting factor. If the entirety of the market is running on lower powered devices, then it would get catered for - because there'd be no (or not enough) customers with high powered devices to profit off.
      • Insanity 10mo ago
        In general what you are saying makes sense. But there are specific counter examples, such as Crysis in 2008 or CyberPunk 2077 some years ago. Both didn’t run great on the “average consumer hardware”. But I’ll admit this is cherry picking from my side :)
  • rurp 10mo ago
    The problem is that higher performing devices will still exist. Those engineers will probably keep using performant devices and their managers will certainly keep buying them. We'll probably end up in an even more bifurcated world where the well off have access to lot of great products and services that most of humanity is increasingly unable to access.
• SXX 10mo ago
  No dedicated GPU is certainly unrelated to whatever been happening for last two years. It's just in last 5 years integrated GPUs become good enough even for mid-tier gaming let alone running browser and hw accel in few work apps. And even before 5 years ago majority of dedicated GPUs in relatively cheap laptops was garbage barely better than intrgrated one. Manufacturers mostly put them in there for marketing of having e.g Nvidia dGPU.
  • amiga-workbench 10mo ago
    A dedicated GPU is a red flag for me in a laptop. I do not want the extra power draw or the hybrid graphics sillyness. The Radeon Vega in my ThinkPad is surprisingly capable.
    • trinsic2 10mo ago
      Yea I agree it's not worth it to have a igpu a dedicated. If I'm correct in what you are talking about. There's always issues with that setup in laptops. But I'd stay away from all laptops at this point until we get an Adminstration that enforces anti trust. All manufactures have been cutting so many corners, your likely to have hardware problems within a year unless it's a MacBook or a business class laptop.
    • iancmceachern 10mo ago
      For me it's a necessity to run the software I need to do my work (CAD design)
      • account42 9mo ago
        How so? APUs have gotten powerful enough that they can manage even moderately demanding games (at reasonable resolutions).
    • silon42 10mo ago
      Same here... I do not wish for a laptop with >65W USB-C power requirements.
    • 10mo ago
• 999900000999 10mo ago
  Or, we can expect better from software. Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use. The pattern of lazy almost non existent optimization combined with blaming consumers for having weak hardware, needs to stop. On my 16GB ram lunar lake budget laptop CachyOS( Arch) runs so much smoother than Windows. This is very unscientific, but using htop , running Chrome/YouTube playing music, 2 browser games and VS code having Git Copilot review a small project, I was only using 6GBs of ram. For the most part I suspect I could do normal consumer stuff( filing paperwork and watching cat videos) on an 8GB laptop just fine. Assuming I'm using Linux. All this Windows 11 bloat makes computers slower than they should be. A part of me hopes this pushes Microsoft to at least create a low ram mode that just runs the OS and display manager. Then let's me use my computer as I see fit instead of constantly doing a million other weird things. We don't *need* more ram. We need better software.
  • dottjt 10mo ago
    That's not happening though, hence why we need more ram.
    • ssl-3 10mo ago
      Eh? As I see it, we've got options. Option A: We do a better job at optimizing software so that good performance requires less RAM than might otherwise be required Option B: We wish that things were different, such that additional RAM were a viable option like it has been at many times in the past. Option C: We use our time-benders to hop to a different timeline where this is all sorted more favorably (hopefully one where the Ballchinians are friendly) --- To evaluate these in no particular order: Option B doesn't sound very fruitful. I mean: It can be fun to wish, but magical thinking doesn't usually get very far. Option C sounds fun, but my time-bender got roached after the last jump and the version of Costco we have here doesn't sell them. (Maybe someone else has a working one, but they seem to be pretty rare here.) That leaves option A: Optimize the software once, and duplicate that optimized software to whomever it is useful using that "Internet" thing that the cool kids were talking about back in the 1980s.
• chii 10mo ago
  > Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs it was only less than 10 yrs ago that a high end PC would have this level of ram. I think the last decade of cheap ram and increasing core count (and hz) have spoiled a lot of people. We are just returning back on trend. May be software would be written better now that you cannot expect the average low budget PC to have 32G of ram and 8 cores.
  • vee-kay 10mo ago
    You need to compare relative prices and availability too, from a VFM (value for money (price vs quality+quantity)) perspective. A budget PC today at a certain price point (say, $500) would certainly have a lot more powerful CPU and faster disk storage and faster RAM than a similarly priced PC just 5 years ago. But as OSes and programs get more bloated and more complex, I feel 1TB+ SSDs are required these days in PCs. Windows OS and programs themselves can take up hundreds of GBs of space. But you will notice that budget PCs are being launched these days with lower-grade CPUs (i3 or equivalent), lesser RAM (8GB), lesser storage (256 or 500GB) SSD. We seem to be regressing backwards in specs for PCs and even mobiles (good luck finding features like NFC and wireless charging in budget phones these days; though these features were available in same segment (budget phones) few years ago). And it is not just due to AI, it is due to hardware manufacturers and assemblers thinking they can hoodwink consumers and sell us less value for more price.
• GuB-42 10mo ago
  I think it is the result of specs like RAM and CPU no longer being the selling point it once was, except for gaming PCs. Instead people want thin laptops, good battery life, nice screens, premium materials, etc... We have got to the point where RAM and CPU are no longer a limiting factor for most tasks, or at least until software become bloated enough to matter again. If you want a powerful laptop for cheap, get a gaming PC. The build quality and battery life probably won't be great, but you can't be cheap without making compromises. Same idea for budget mobiles. A Snapdragon Gen 6 (or something by Mediatek) with UFS2.2 is more than what most people need.
• koito17 10mo ago
  This is what I find a bit alarming, too. My M3 Max MacBook Pro takes 2 full seconds to boot Slack, a program that used to literally be an IRC client. Many people still believe client-side compute is cheap and worrying about it is premature optimization. Of course, some performance-focused software (e.g. Zed) does start near-instantly on my MacBook, and it makes other software feel sluggish in comparison. But this is the exception, not the rule. Even as specs regress, I don't think most people in software will care about performance. In my experience, product managers never act on the occasional "[X part of an app] feels clunky" feedback from clients. I don't expect that to change in the near future.
  • Workaccount2 10mo ago
    Software has an unfortunate attribute (compared to hardware) where it's largely bound by what users will tolerate as opposed to what practically is possible. Imagine Ford, upon the invention of push-button climate controls, just layered those buttons on top of the legacy sliders, using arms and actuators so pressing "Heat Up" moved an actuating arm that moved that underlying legacy "Heat" slider up. Then when touch screens came about, they just put a tablet over those buttons (which are already over the sliders), so selecting "Heat Up" fired a solenoid that pressed the "Heat Up" button that moved the arm to slide the "Heat Up" slider. Ford, or anyone else doing hardware, would never implement this or it's analog, for a long obvious list of reasons. But in software? That's just Thursday. Hence software has seemed stuck in time for 30 years while processing speed has done 10,000x. No need to redesign the whole system, just type out a few lines of "actuating arm" code.
• HexPhantom 10mo ago
  I think a lot of this rings true, but what makes it especially frustrating is that none of it feels technically necessary
• mmsimanga 10mo ago
  It is even worse for those of us in Africa. The equivalent phone I can buy for USD$150-250 back home is absolutely shocking in terms of how bad it is in ram ,disk space and often an outdated version of Android. I buy my phones on Amazon US which delivers and I get a much better phone for the same price range.
  • lysace 10mo ago
    In that price range paid bundling of pre-installed apps become a major economi driver. Those installs are worth a lot more in the US.
    • mmsimanga 10mo ago
      Ah that makes sense. Thanks for the insight.
• cons0le 10mo ago
  >It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else. I mean, isn't this exactly what happened? I could be wrong about this, but didn't ycombinator themselves say they weren't accepting any ideas that didn't include AI? 80 percent of the jobs people reach out to me for are shady AI jobs that I have no interest in. Hiring in other non-AI jobs seems to have slowed. When I talk to "computer" people, they only want to talk about AI. I wish I could quit computers and never look at a screen again.