Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices

I wouldn't be happy with 8 GB of RAM regardless of OS.

Someone's smelling the year of the desktop

Minix and FreeBSD...

/runs; hides

They don't care, my parents laptop was decently mid-range spec bar storage, manufacturer put in a 5400RPM spinning rust drive. It was damn near unusable, crap from the factory.

Was forced to use it once when visiting and noticed the performance, put an SSD in it and it's been a fine laptop since. They're perfectly willing to hobble a laptop to save a buck.

I run fedora on 8GB and find it functional but definitely not comfortable. Anything past a dozen tabs and it starts getting choked up.

Linux adoption.. accelerates

No OS if fine with 8GB if you use it for anything other than browsing memes

You're thinking of CP/M, right?

It's the year of the Linux desktop!

I agree, funny enough they require minimum 4 GB, but I had problems with it with 16 GB. 8 GB is nowhere near enough, especially if you use excel, teams, and that crap.

It’s like if batteries got stupid expensive and they tried to tell us 200km of range is what you get in a touring EV these days. But the distances between all the places haven’t changed…

Isn’t the issue here the newest generation? I keep reading they’re way less tech savvy than the rest of us. Blended in with the propensity for young people to have an iPhone or Android and no PC, well, this junk will likely slide right by.

Or more realistically be used as an excuse for always online cloud based services a la office 365. "We would let you download the app, but most users don't have the computing power so instead we'll just make this a helpful subscription!"

At least one studio, Larian, has confirmed this is the case for them.

When discussing the pressures the company faces when releasing a game in early access, such as audience expectations, Vincke told us, "Interestingly, another [issue Larian is facing] is really the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and f**k, man. It's like, literally, we've never had it like this."

He continued, "It kind of ruins all of your projections that you had about it because normally, you know the curves, and you can protect the hardware. It's gonna be an interesting one. It means that most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point in time. So it's challenging, but it's video games."

Tried that yesterday, 2.6 GB for just that one tab playing a twitch stream. That's honestly impressive.

Keeping it positive, nice.

In the world of AI vibe coding, I don't think so, they will push people even more towards web apps I think

that would require the software companies to actually spend money on competent developers instead of tossing peanuts at prompt writers.

I am honestly not sure if that's a bad thing aside from the capitalism of it all. Almost all tasks normal people do could be done with a 10 year old computer running Linux.

I will find it hilarious if this RAM pricing issue causes people to move to Linux rather than have slow ass Windows 11.

Or web applications, Firefox/Chrome uses like 32 GB RAM and constantly crashes my computer because of it

thank you. came here to say this.

or, well, it also doesn't play well with ARM, i.e. on macbooks the ram isn't the bottle neck, its the CPU struggling with electron despite objectively being faster than x86 equivalents.

Those soldered low RAM ones are going to be in the dump a lot sooner.

lmao of course it's gonna be soldered in to push you to higher tiers

"WHY IS IT SO SLOW?!?!?!"

And set up ZRAM.

Swap is a thing. It'll kinda suck, but not as much as it would have pre-nvme. Except that now there's an nvme shortage... and an SSD shortage.

Ugh, I guess I'll just put Windows 2000/ME on there to complete the retro look.

You could technically boot it… Not for long, and don’t open anything, but still counts, right?

concidering they were shipping windows 11 systems on 4 gigs of ram and selling it, I expect it won't change much. They worked like shit but they still sold. You make it cheap enough people will buy it regardless of flaws or speed.

I wonder what's going to happen to the electron frontends if machines are bottlenecked by ram so bad. Wasn't facebook just planning to switch whatsapp's frontend to webview as well? And win11's desktop is electron too. Everyone was acting like ram is unlimited.

I have win11 on a work surface laptop pro with 16gb and I'm consistently at 15+GB used. This is corporate bloat. How do I know? I have a personal surface pro 6 with win11 and 16gb and it runs like a breeze.

Corporate bloat is such bullshit.

Company computers often come with pre-installed spyware which is notoriously RAM hungry. My company laptop immediately after boot uses nearly a full 16gb before you open any programs. Luckily our IT department realizes this and only allows us to purchase machines with 32GB and up. They're probably not happy with the current prices, but being a F500 company they can afford it...

...do we really need to use the word "raping" to talk about PC performance or can we agree that there are a hundred other words that fit better in that spot?

EDIT: Wooo free downvotes. Y'all are a bunch of snowflakes. I tried to make a point on behalf of others, since there are people who have traumatic lived experience with the concept of "rape" and would probably prefer not to be reminded of it. Nobody serious about computing is going to go out and say "this process is raping the performance" because it's just not a good idea. I bet you (if in tech field) wouldn't say it in front of your boss. But sure, call me sensitive and pull out a semantic argument.

I can smell you through your screen. Go take a shower and try being human.

Seems to me like there will be a split. A lot of critical thinkers that are frugal will move to Linux and up its market-share, but there will also be a lot of deals that companies make with cloud computing platforms as well for their employees instead of purchasing new laptops (which will probably also allow them to cut back on their IT staff).

Those that are still lost when it comes to tech from 20 years ago will also buy into cloud compute platforms just because they use it at work and can't be arsed to learn something slightly different.

Windows 11 can run on 4GB. That's the minimum for the listed requirements, and the other day, I saw Best Buy selling a 4GB model, and I see some systems for sale online. I would imagine that it's not ideal.

Im really surprised Microsoft hasn't already come out with a chrome-os like neutered version of windows specifically for this.

'entry level' specs have been 4gb ram for over a decade, and they're still selling shit-tier laptops with only that today.

You don't need to load the mouse driver on your laptop. We have a subscription service for it!

We'll trim it down so the mouse driver only has a little AI.

laughs in MS-DOS

Exactly. Give me two slots and I don't care if the base model comes with 64kb, that problem will be fixed before I even switch the thing on for the first time.

I boycott those.

So it remains shit quality even if RAM gets more affordable at some reasonable point in the future.

Apparently there are m.2 NVMe drives with DRAM caches.

I don't know if anyone makes a pure DRAM NVMe drive --- it'd forget its contents every boot --- but if so, on Linux, you could make the block device a swap partition.

That too on ARM. Whereas modern applications on Windows (and Mac, Linux) even on high performance x86 sucks so much. Slack and Chrome are two of the worst pieces of software ever designed by humans.

More like for the price of 64GB.

For the price of 32GB, if you're lucky. Hopefully it's 8gb in a single stick so upgrading is cheaper, even if that means single channel ram speeds out of the box

You must be using Linux.

Perhaps. I've recently watched a video on historical coins and the quality of relief.

Things like Athenian tetradrachm were very rare, and thus done properly. The more and more numerous recognizable coins had to be (inflation ; for much of history in much of the world old or foreign money would be valid currency), the simpler were the designs. Medieval European mints had to make such amounts of coins, that they were very simple and streamlined.

So what this has to do with computing - building something in an empty place works differently than replacing\changing something in the middle of an old city. When computers were new, things worked differently than now, economically and socially.

It's possible that when this settles into something more stable, normal amounts of RAM for personal computers will again be in megabytes.

They'll solder 4gb. So even if RAM prices go down, you're still effffed

there's a number of laptops already that do have 8gb on the board and no sodimm slots.

It's the web as it exists now. It can't be fixed gradually, or at least that's harder than to design from scratch a replacement with same abilities, but fewer levels of abstraction, less bloat, making a client application in reasonable time being possible. Probably with architecture and semantics centered around how social networks and messengers work, not just hypertext. Visiting a webpage and reading a group chat are different ideas, the latter doesn't imply connecting to one specific location. Again, that's something that was understood since Usenet. Just no public system like Usenet, but not morally obsolete, emerged to be popular.

Just go back to “native” apps and not all this web tech bloated crap.

Since 2015 I was selling clients 16GB minimum. Too many performance issues with 8 on a majority of them. Last year I changed to 32GB minimum. 16 is not much for people who do a lot with their computer.

I mean, if you're running Linux it's a different story.

Try zram or zswap since you're on Linux.

Running windows 11 is already uncomfortable, but not for RAM reasons.

What do you mean? You can browse like one web page with 8GB of RAM. 😜

Infect everything. Claim you need bailouts because everything has AI in it.

I have 16 GB in my 2014 laptop that still serves as my daily driver. 8 GB twelve years later is a joke.

Weird way to spell Linux Mint

Typically the CPU and motherboard are both tied to a specific generation of RAM, which is keyed and traced differently on the motherboard for DDR 4 vs 5.

For example the current AMD socket AM5 requires DDR 5. You’d have to go back to AM4 Ryzen 5000 series for DDR 4 support.

dell's been going down the crapper for at least a decade..... ever since dell and the vultures took it private ~ 2013.

Sorry. New processors only use ddr5. You'll have to buy something used (or low end old-stock) if you want ddr4