3 ms·

Battery life is certainly part of it; RAM that isn’t being used still draws power. But isn’t the whole idea behind an ultra-portable that you make sacrifices f

• barrkel 12y ago
  The single biggest thing that lengthens the useful lifetime of a PC is memory - as much as you can fit. There's compromises, and then there's hobbling.
  • simonh 12y ago
    It depends what your priorities are. If lightness and thinnes and battery life are top priorities, and making the RAM upgradeable or increasing the space on the board to provide that as an option compromises those, then a machine that makes that compromise is hobbled. The whole point of having more than one laptop design in your lineup is that they make different design tradeoffs.
• TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  However, enough RAM prevents additional disk operations, which draw substantially more power, be it an SSD or spinning disk. Also, RAM typically draws very little power compared to other components (screen, etc, etc). The reason why we are still having discussions about the specs on low-end / ultraportable laptops is that they are so often almost useful, but take things one step too far.