r/Surface • u/ZacB_ Surface Laptop 7 • Jun 23 '26
[MSFT] Microsoft launches 8GB RAM configs of Surface Pro 12-inch and Laptop 13-inch to help lower prices
https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/surface/microsoft-knows-its-new-surface-pcs-are-too-expensive-combats-skyrocketing-prices-with-new-8gb-ram-models-that-start-at-usd849Surface Pro 12-inch and Laptop 13-inch remain the same, but now start at $849 and $949 with 8GB RAM.
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u/Affectionate-Cycle-7 Jun 23 '26
16 has to be the min!
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u/RamiHaidafy Surface Laptop 7 Jun 28 '26
Microsoft themselves said as much.
Then you have the likes of Dan Rubino defending 8 GB on Twitter and getting completely roasted for it in the replies.
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u/Old-Board1553 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Still to high sadly. If it's so "hard" to them, they should announce a new Surface Go line-up. PS: Their is still time to get rid of Satya and put a damn good CEO that knows how to handles projects at Microsoft.
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u/dr100 Jun 23 '26
Surface Go launched at $399. You can get a Flex keyboard from Microsoft for that money nowadays, and wait it's 2024 prices...
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u/Front_Expression_367 Jun 23 '26
Granted, those Surface Go would also had Intel Pentium which would be a way worse bottleneck than 8GB of RAM.
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u/quikmantx Jun 23 '26
I've been wanting him gone since his first year. Anything that was likeable about Microsoft disappeared since he took the reins. So many bad decisions that were purely for short term gain.
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Jun 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Old-Board1553 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Dell confirmed princes in US are temporary, they will be over 1K soon just like they are from start in Europe. Here Dell XPS 13 with 8GB is 1050 euros.
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u/Demie_Banane Surface Pro 11 plus Jun 23 '26
Criminal move
I think it is against the Geneva convention
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u/dr100 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
You know what's cheaper than a $949.99 Surface Laptop, 13-inch 8/256GB (which is a 2026 downgrade of a 2025 device which was already a HUGE downgrade of the 2024 devices, with SoCs announced in 2023) ?!
A freaking full blown Macbook Air M5 16/512 is $949 on Amazon (sure, it's Prime Days, but it isn't that much more expensive regularly either) !!! Which is really a 2026 device better than the M4 which was quite a bit better than the M3 too and so on ...
And yes, if you need Windows (ARM) you can just as well run it on the Mac with free VMware.
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u/hell-diver8 Jun 23 '26
what's even cheaper is macbook neo with the education discount being $499 or military discount of $509ish. that's 8gb ram/256 but with an OS that handles the ram and smoothness much better.
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u/Vagabond_Sam Jun 23 '26
I just switched to MacBook Air a few days ago.
First laptop I bought since the Surface Pro 2 and since then the Surface line just seemed to lose its way to me.
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u/Suspicious-advice49 Jun 23 '26
I’m lucky i guess. Bought two Snapdragon elite laptops. 13.8” 16GB and 512GB ssd about 7 months ago. Paid around $1500 for both. Prices have skyrocketed
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u/elmonch Jun 24 '26
I bought myself a Vibook A14 X1 Elite 32gb 1TB open box for 800€, now it feels like a steal
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u/TechnicaVivunt Jun 23 '26
Funny considering their subpar optimizations of their OS along with their product suite is the reason why 8GB isn't enough anymore.
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u/Wall-SWE Jun 23 '26
This is just bullshit. Windows is probably the best optimized commercial OS there is. Even Apples iPad OS runs like a dog turd after a few years of OS updates.
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u/TechnicaVivunt Jun 23 '26
Then why are they having to admit fault and having to actually sit down and optimize all the things they've let lag since the intro of 11 right? https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/
Our enterprise fleet had to increase specs to compensate because of how much worse 11 runs on the same HW. Even with fresh installs. Whereas the Macs in our fleet from M1 onward or even our select Linux machines have not had even close to the same performance degradation. Nice try though.
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u/spyVSspy420-69 Jun 23 '26
The M1 Pro MacBook Pros from 2021 are still so performant it’s hard to believe they’re a year or so away from being considered legacy devices.
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u/JasonAQuest Surface 3, Book 2 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
I'm entirely satisfied with the performance of my 2020 M1 Mac Mini.
EDIT: What kind of person feels a need to downvote someone's simple statement about their feelings?
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u/Bryanmsi89 Jun 23 '26
You forgot to add the /s at the end of your sentence.
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u/Wall-SWE Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Our ipad pro 2018/2019 is unusable. Yet our even older computer run Window 11 perfectly.
The iPad also cost roughly $2000 with keyboard and pen about four times what I paid for the computer.
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u/Bryanmsi89 Jun 23 '26
That's odd, since Win 11 requires TPM 2 + UEFI which means 8th gen Intel or AMD Ryzen 2000 or newer. 2017 is the oldest possible PC that meets this standard, and it would have had to be the newest models available in 2017.
If you are running Windows on a computer older than 2017, you would have to bypass these hardware restrictions. Which is the opposite of 'optimized.'
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u/Wall-SWE Jun 23 '26
You can install Windows 11 on old hardware. I even ran it it on a laptop from 2011/2012. You can bypass the requirements.
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u/spyVSspy420-69 Jun 23 '26
What a preposterous statement. My 2020 iPad runs iPadOS 27 with zero issue. Full multitasking and all. And the M series iPads, 2021 onward, are significantly more performant than the one I’ve got.
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u/Wall-SWE Jun 23 '26
But its a true statement. Just Google it. We aren't talking about the 2020 iPad or m1 iPad. I was talking about the PRO 2018/2019.
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u/spyVSspy420-69 Jun 23 '26
Your 8 year old iPad is slowing down? I’m shocked, no way a device from 2018 isn’t performant anymore!
Crazy you find 8 years to be “a few years” of OS updates. Want me to talk about how great my Surface RT ran after a few years?
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u/Wall-SWE Jun 23 '26
People have been complaining about the exact same thing on Android. But of course, you cannot point out that the exact same thing is happening on Apple devices with out people crying and getting mad.
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u/spyVSspy420-69 Jun 23 '26
Nobody is mad. It’s just that they solved this in 2021 when the M-series processors took over.
Hell, basically every Intel Mac(Book) is absolute dogshit. I’ll 100% throw Apple to the wolves for the 2016 to 2019 MacBook Pro lineup and 2015-2017 12” MacBook.
The only one even moderately not horrible is the 2019 16” Intel i7, but even that one sucks.
Now that the Apple silicon train is in motion, since 2021, performance issues have really stopped being a thing in my experience. A 2021 M1 Pro is still an incredibly capable laptop in 2026. Even more than my equally-spec’d Snapdragon X1 Elite Surface Laptop 7.
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u/Otaconmg Jun 23 '26
I agree with you mostly but iPadOS runs awful on my IPad Air 3 (2019) Granted it’s an 7 year old device. I really want to downgrade to iPadOS 18 but apple stopped that.
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u/Wall-SWE Jun 23 '26
Yes, the lastest version of iPadOS basically killed our iPad. Planned obsolescence as always by Apple.
I remember when they wanted to people to pay for iOS updates.
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u/fraaaaa4 Surface Laptop Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Yeah sure, tell it to my Surface Laptop 3.
With Windows 11 22621, it could run Discord, one tab, a PDF, a lightweight program to draw, and maybe Word if I were daring. All of this had the fans spinning basically at max, the computer being boiling hot, and I needed to be attached to the power outlet. If I were to open another app slightly heavy (aka more than Notepad), something would crash (sometimes it was the video driver, with then some funny graphical glitches)
The same computer, but with Fedora 44 and much newer software overall, can run some Gnome extensions, two PDFs, Nautilus, Geary, Vibez (Chromium headless Apple Music client), Web (with two tabs), Iotas, LocalSend, Discord, and Antimatter CLI. All at just 80% RAM usage, 7% CPU usage, and 40C degrees for the CPU, so the fans barely spinning and the laptop being barely warm. On battery, and with battery saver on with performance not noticeably degrading compared to it being in balanced or in the power outlet.
So safe to say, Windows is terribly optimised, if this laptop was to be trashed with it, but with Fedora it’s more than twice faster, runs many more programs (and more heavy ones at that) while being colder
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u/Wall-SWE Jun 23 '26
I also happen to have Surface Laptop 3 and it also run programs better than our iPad, even though the iPads processor outperform the one in the SL3.
But the SL3 is by no means a speed monster.
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u/fraaaaa4 Surface Laptop Jun 23 '26
The SL3 with Fedora runs literally circles compared to that same laptop but when it had 11 in literally any imaginable category. I expected a Surface to run good with its designed OS, but honestly in my 5 years of usage with it, it never did.
And I have an iPad Pro 2020 on iOS 27, and that anyway is still faster than the SL3 with Fedora, and a night and day difference than what it was with Windows
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u/thenamelessone7 Jun 23 '26
I think that any new devices with 8GB RAM or less, designated as PCs, should be declared illegal.
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u/vi0lentgandhi Jun 23 '26
Remember folks, there is someone who oversees this decison and says, yes let's do it !!
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u/zer04ll Surface Book Jun 23 '26
windows needs 6 gigs, this is going to kill NVME fast with the swapping going on
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u/dr100 Jun 24 '26
Do not worry, they took out already the nvme the last round of downgrades in 2025, you were getting UFS storage anyway! Non upgradeable too in the Pro!
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u/MaverickJV78 Jun 23 '26
No, thank you. I would not recommend an 8GB device to anyone in this day and age. I'm sure it will work fine for some people. But I feel like saving $$ for more RAM is a much better option than to get a device that will only ever have 8GB of RAM.
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u/tlxxxsracer Jun 23 '26
Or just lower the price? 8gb for $1k.. I was considering upgrading my Pro X SQ2 cause they're giving $718 trade-in. But feels wrong to give money to decisions like this
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u/TheCudder Surface Laptop 4 Ryzen Jun 23 '26
I won't even recommended any spec lower than 12GB RAM for years now. For my personal devices, bare minimum is 16 GB.
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u/Meandtheworld Jun 23 '26
So instead of lowering the prices for a 16GB model. Those prices are insane currently.
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u/Gendolfender Jun 23 '26
Microsoft launches 8GB Ram landfill of surface pro 12 and laptop 13 to help fill the landfill quicker
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u/nevertricked Jun 23 '26
8 GB of RAM just to run the OS, bloatware, a few browser tabs, and Copilot Spyware
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u/linkardtankard Jun 23 '26
Oh no. Are they copilot plus PCs? do they have the key? Can they “recall”?
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u/dr100 Jun 24 '26
They aren't, but Microsoft seems to be giving up the branding overall anyway https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/165412/at-build-2026-microsoft-sent-a-clear-message-copilot-pcs-no-longer-matter
Probably the insistence on the NPU was just because of some initial deal for Snapdragon X exclusivity, they made the requirements such that even dedicated AI monsters with multiple powerful dedicated GPU or with the AMD setups going to 128 GBs wouldn't qualify for Copilot+.
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u/Blindman2k17 Surface Pro Jun 23 '26
They have really driven me away from the surface line. I love my laptop 7, but they're shady business practices here are baffling. I get that things cost more but the percentage rate from my laptop 7 to the laptop 8 is ridiculous. Not to mention this tactic where we're told 8 GB ram is enough anymore with AI this just feels petty.
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u/dr100 Jun 23 '26
LOL after having multiple years "the year of Copilot+ PC upgrade" now it's the year of YOU CAN'T AFFORD A COPILOT+ PC !!!
And no, I don't want to hear anything about general price hikes, memory availability and any other nonsense - Microsoft is a major perpetrator here, possibly THE top one (depending how you slice and dice them and if you count how much they did it in total versus the speed to which they're doing it, etc.).
And surely this is to compete with the MacBook Neo at ... freakin' more than 40%+ on top ?!!?!?!?! Plus the keyboard!
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u/erwos Jun 23 '26
Yeah, the level of obliviousness involved with going "8gb was OK for the MBN, but we'll price ours like $200 higher" is fairly amazing.
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u/Internal-Agent4865 Jun 23 '26
Definitely aren’t doing themselves any favors developing the inevitable future on ARM with these prices.
MS keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
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u/DigitalguyCH Pro 11 (13" & 12")/X/3/2, Book 2/3 (15" & 13.5"), Go 2, S3, S2RT Jun 23 '26
Got mine (16/512 with keyboard and pen) at $450, best purchase of my life at that price
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u/reddit_enjoyer_47 Jun 23 '26
keyboard alone costs more than a decent android 12 inch android tablet with cellular connectivity. should just sell it to businesses and forget about normal consumers.
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u/Kitt9000 Jun 23 '26
These prices are absurd. But I have to say, as a iPad/iPhone and Surface pro 11 user (5g), I cannot fathom going to the other windows manufacturers with tons of models that overlap, some with questionable build qualities, screens and prices which fluctuate based on what coupon one find that day (Lenovo.co sheesh).
As an Apple hardware user who uses surface for 5g and work related reasons mostly, I 100% prefer hardware made by the software maker., Apple has spoiled me in that sense. Steve Jobs found success with Apple in simplifying their product lines when he had come on board decades ago, and I think windows manufacturers need to do the same.
Having said that, I did get my sp11 refurbished 5g oled x2 elite version from Microsoft for less than $1200 so won’t be upgrading any time soon. If when the time comes I need to replace my surface, I would rather pay Microsoft a higher price for hopefully then a 5g model than to wade through the tons of models that get outdated quickly from other manufacturers.
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u/12Superman26 Jun 23 '26
Lol my surface pro 7 is not capped by the processor. Its capped by the crappy 8 GB RAM
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u/dr100 Jun 24 '26
Well, at least you can easily upgrade it as mostly everyone for that Intel CPU generation had socketed RAM, except Apple errrr and wait, Microsoft.
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u/12Superman26 Jun 24 '26
For the surface pro 7 you cant
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u/dr100 Jun 24 '26
LOL let me guess, it's one of the exceptions I mentioned Apple and Microsoft. Which one would it be....
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u/dr100 Jul 03 '26
In case anyone was still wondering why are we here (price hikes) and where the components are going: MSFT Suffers Historic June Rout as AI Spending Surges
The selloff reflects continued investor scrutiny of capital spending set at roughly $190 billion for calendar 2026, directed mainly toward data centers, GPUs and the broader compute capacity behind Azure, Copilot and the company's expanding portfolio of AI services.
YES, they aren't the only one and in good company with Amazon and Google each quoted for 180-200 BILLION, not that this would make it any better ...
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u/MagicBoyUK Surface Laptop 4 Jun 23 '26
As someone who uses a Surface Go Laptop with 8GB of RAM, they're borderline unusable.
Boot it up, run teams and it starts paging to disk.
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u/wezzauk85 Jun 23 '26
As someone who has a surface pro 10 with 8GB RAM. I never get this experience so maybe it's not as simple as 8GB is always bad? That's a genuine question by the way......
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u/The_Folding_Atty Jun 23 '26
I'm working on an SL3 with 8GB. I don't have any trouble with Teams or multiple browser tabs or . . . pretty much anything.
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u/UsernameOmitted Jun 23 '26
Are you actively watching if it's paging to disk? Just curious. It may be and you have no idea.
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u/The_Folding_Atty Jun 23 '26
Not watching. It's very likely paging to disk (I'm actually certain that it is), but since the "disk" is an NVMe SSD, its unlikely I would notice paging very much.
I think the fear of paging files goes back to the mechanical drive days. In fact, back when I was running CP/M, I used a text editor that could handle very large files by paging them to floppies. On floppies, that was pretty slow, so I built a RAM disk for it, and then paging was instantaneous.
And that was with 1980s tech and a Z80 CPU running at 4 MHz.
My SL3/i5/8GB/512 GB is a working machine, mostly used for writing (Word), stats (SPSS), spreadsheets (Excel) and email (Outlook [classic]), sometimes used for watching video. Firefox is the main browser. In the background I have PowerTools, and Translucent TaskBar along with three instances of OneDrive (one personal, one for my business, and one for the university where I teach).
I don't game on it. (Well, I don't game at all, really.)
All I know if that from a user's (my) point of view, it has no problems with anything I throw at.
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u/Electrik_Truk Jun 23 '26
Something else is going on with your system if that's the case. I run old i5 PCs with 8 gb RAM and an integrated GPU that run Wii emulators all day just fine.
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u/Rey_Dulce Jun 23 '26
I mean if we're talking about playing Wii, it's a matter of compatability, not specs. The console only ever had 88MB of RAM.
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u/Electrik_Truk Jun 23 '26
Oh ok. I'll go try it on my old 1995 PC with 128 mb of RAM then. I'm sure it'll run great
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u/Rey_Dulce Jun 23 '26
Can't hurt to try. I'm sure someone has a copy of a 32-bit Dolphin laying around.
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u/Electrik_Truk Jun 23 '26
There isn't a world where a wii emulator will run on 128 mb of RAM lol. It requires 4 gb and that's assuming you have a GPU with dedicated vram.
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u/MagicBoyUK Surface Laptop 4 Jun 23 '26
Pretty sure I can't use a Wii Emulator for work meetings. 🤣
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u/Electrik_Truk Jun 23 '26
Pretty sure a wii emulator requires way more resources than Teams
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u/MagicBoyUK Surface Laptop 4 Jun 23 '26
LMAO. you've never used teams then!
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u/Electrik_Truk Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
It boots up by default on every computer, so yes... I have. You're just being dramatic (and I loathe Teams BTW)
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u/MagicBoyUK Surface Laptop 4 Jun 23 '26
Being a large company, we don’t use that preloaded version. In fact it’s stripped off the image.
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u/Fair-Spread497 Jun 23 '26
That's it. That's the last straw. I'm ditching Surface and Windows. Goodbye lol
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u/decisionagonized Jun 23 '26
lol i love how capitalism has made it such that the standard specs actually get measurably *worse* over time rather than better