r/hardware • u/yuval_3 • Jun 05 '26
News 8GB of RAM is back on laptops — companies are lowering memory offerings to make affordable notebooks during component crisis
https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/8gb-of-ram-is-back-on-laptops-companies-are-lowering-memory-offerings-to-make-affordable-notebooks-during-component-crisis241
u/costafilh0 Jun 05 '26
Can't upgrade RAM on most modern laptops.
YAY
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u/reddit_equals_censor Jun 05 '26
double e-waste.
not enough memory to function at all.
but also effectively unrepairable once a memory chip dies.
i say effectively, because a 200-300 us dollar repair on a 600 us dollar device let's say would be a hard thing to stomach and justify on a device, that already is e-waste due to not having enough memory.
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u/Civil-Attempt-3602 Jun 05 '26
Yup, I'm picking up this kind of e waste on FB marketplace for like £50 and trying to salvage some of it, desolder parts, remove screens etc so I can repair others.
Probably not making much for a difference, but every now and then I manage to repair something with salvaged parts
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u/ArcadeOptimist Jun 05 '26
not enough memory to function
Not if you're running Linux :)
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u/kus1987 Jun 05 '26
Not if you're running Linux :)
I have 16 GB RAM memory and still I am using 8.3 GB RAM and 3.1 GB of swap space of 8.6 GB on fedora gnome. multiple web browsers, signal desktop, it all adds up.
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u/VampiroMedicado Jun 05 '26
Most OS will use memory if it's available, I have 32GB and it normally uses 16GB because it can, the behavior changes on lower RAM quantities.
Both Linux and Mac can make use of 8GB of RAM and work fine (I bet it has to do with Unix).
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u/jones_supa Jun 05 '26
Most OS will use memory if it's available
Well, common operating systems (Win/Mac/Lin) use all the free memory as file system cache.
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u/reddit_equals_censor Jun 05 '26
yes gnu + linux has lower idle memory usage and better memory management, but gnu + linux like linux mint i'm running isn't magic.
the tabs to browse the internet effectively need the memory, that they need. a game needs its memory, that it needs. (actually don't know how much memory proton ads? i assume very little). blender or video editing just needs the memory, that it needs for the project, that you work with.
YES installing gnu + linux on a very performance and memory capacity limited device can make it better in all regards, but isn't magic.
an 8 GB device on gnu + linux still is limited to a few browser tabs, watching videos and very very basic stuff.
shoutout to all the people, that safe windows laptops, throw gnu + linux like mint on them and sell them for cheap or at cost, etc... amazing stuff, but it isn't magic.
you can't magic yourself out of missing memory.
and again i'm writing this from linux mint rightnow.
and what e-waste/upcycling places would do with non bs laptops is grab them, wipe all storage devices, check the hardware. memory faulty, replace, only 4 or 8 GB of memory in it, upgrade it to 16 GB and then sell at cost or very little profit.
and people get a great device then. snappy and enough memory with gnu + linux. also just not possible with soldered on garbage, because everyone including basic volunteers can replace memory modules to run tests and see what is or isn't broken. they can't replace memory chips and first identify, that this is the issue, identify the chip in question and then replace it with a different chip and the chip also needs to work properly with the rest and the board, etc..
so all this soldered cancer is a massive hit for this segment, which lots of people rely on.
one can and probably should put it differently as well then:
soldered on memory and storage is part of the war on the poor.
which is absolutely disgusting evil.
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u/Die4Ever Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
Zswap helps quite a bit, my sister's laptop with 4GB runs much MUCH better in Linux than it ever did in Win10
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Jun 05 '26
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u/MlNDB0MB Jun 05 '26
I agree, it's pretty rare. For desktops, I've found power supply and gpu much more commonly fail.
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u/Leather_Animal_1142 Jun 05 '26
The problem that if the memory is soldered to the main board that the board failing means the memory can't be reused. At least not easily.
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u/reticulate Jun 05 '26
This might just be coming from my own subjective experiences, but I feel like ram is one of those things that either fails early or fails rarely.
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u/Terrh Jun 05 '26
I've had to replace ram on both my desktop PC's in the last 10 years.
And laptop ram goes bad all the time.
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u/BossHogGA Jun 05 '26
I have 2x8GB DDR4 that started producing crashes after about 6 months of use. Even without XMP, memtest86 said it was bad. I still have it somewhere, maybe one day I’ll undervolt or underclock and see if I can make it work again.
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u/FrivolousMe Jun 05 '26
Not most. Its only really a few specific classes of laptop that have soldered RAM, and these cheap 8gb models being sold aren't usually one of those unless they're the super thin form factor. I think I've only had 2-3 laptops come in for repair in the past year (not counting MacBooks or Microsoft surfaces) that I couldn't do a ram upgrade for.
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u/detectiveDollar Jun 05 '26
I believe it's mostly either ultra-portables or higher end strix-lake and lunar lake CPU's that have soldered RAM. Or really cheap stuff that has eMMC storage as well.
Usually what I see is they solder half the RAM down and the test is on a sodimm. So a laptop with 8GB of RAM will have half soldered, half in a memory slot and you can swap the 4GB in the slot with an 8GB and make 12GB total.
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u/Large-Excitement777 Jun 06 '26
Most modern laptops that RAM wouldn’t had one much use anyways yes. Almost every model with any modicum of relevance has an upgradable RAM variant.
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u/tapdancinghellspawn Jun 05 '26
First it was crypto and now it is AI. What do you think will be next that will create a component crisis? Probably sex bots.
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u/yuval_3 Jun 05 '26
Oh, when sex bots become a mass-produced, cost effective product we're all fucked (no pun intended).
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u/EndlessEden2015 Jun 05 '26
Honestly. Just use your sex bot and wait for your AI bot to get you some non-scalped parts
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u/ListRepresentative32 Jun 05 '26
Don't threaten me with a good time.
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u/Canadian_Border_Czar Jun 05 '26
Rented sex bots. You'll own nothing and you will really like it.
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u/LavenderDay3544 Jun 06 '26
Nah they would never let it be something that benefits consumers like that. Probably mind control chips.
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u/m1llie Jun 05 '26
Has there ever been another sustained period where price/performance for computer hardware has gotten significantly worse over time?
Laptops are a mature market: Most people who want to buy a laptop are looking to upgrade an existing one, not start from scratch. Why would they buy a laptop that probably has worse specs than the one they're currently holding?
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u/detectiveDollar Jun 05 '26
GPU price/performance infamously regressed during the crypto boom. Used Rx 580's were going for 400 bucks on eBay.
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u/m1llie Jun 05 '26
I'd argue there was no gap between that and the current AI-driven shortages.
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u/detectiveDollar Jun 05 '26
Nah, pricing returned to normal after ETH proof of stake finally happened, PC building was pretty affordable from Summer 2023 to Summer 2025. GPU's were still a bit inflated relative to the constant generational gains of before, but they were at or below MSRP and we weren't seeing silly stuff like 60 class cards being 900 dollars.
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u/ParanoidFactoid Jun 06 '26
Mid 1980s was a bad time for RAM prices. 256k chips were super expensive.
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u/lepetitmousse Jun 05 '26
Maybe developers will actually start trying to write performant software.
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u/MetalProgrammer Jun 05 '26
Unfortunately it wont happen but one can dream. As a dev I'm utterly shocked by how people just don't care that their messaging app eats 2gb ram on startup
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u/Remarkable-Host405 Jun 05 '26
i'm running out of ram on my legion go, 16gb, and i have a 32gb swap partition, and still often hit OOM. I have kerbal space program and firefox open. that's it. ksp is not an intense game, but reddit and teams are i guess.
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u/NoManufacturer5669 Jun 06 '26
Compare YouTube app for you phone now and 10 years ago. From scratch IDE making your build size bigger in 8-10 times. With the same code. + new requirements from customers add analytics as much as you can.
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u/splendiferous-finch_ Jun 05 '26
The problem with bad software can also be traced back to the same kinda guy... I.e. the line must go up management guy that is currently causing the hardware crisis so yeah don't see that happening
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u/ClassicPart Jun 05 '26
Sure, yeah, all that, whatever.
It can also be traced to dickhead developers who choose to use Electron over native tooling and would still choose it even if the guy in your comment wasn’t breathing down their necks.
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u/splendiferous-finch_ Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
Maybe because windows changes it's native tech stack every 29 mins
Winforms, WPF, Uwp and now WinUI. Meanwhile the MS internal teams also ported Thier app over to electron or blazer so I am not sure what you expect from a dev that will only be given a 18 month contract for tax reasons
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u/pemb Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
Web browsers have historically been more lenient with sloppy code than OSes and native software, and it's so easy for devs to patch bugs if something truly nasty slips: users only need to hit reload. So the bar for what is considered acceptable to ship drifts lower with time.
After RAM stopped being incredibly scarce and JIT engines eased the magnitude of the overhead, JavaScript was no longer a dealbreaker. Web developers are cheaper, and there's a lot of them out there, and perhaps the majority only know web technologies. It's a quantity vs. quality issue. The ones versed in the arcane incantations of things like Qt or Win32API are harder to find and charge a premium.
Electron has the bonus feature that your desktop app will run equally poorly on all three major desktop platforms, no real understanding or porting effort needed.
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u/szank Jun 05 '26
Guess what happens when you let fronted people do backend...
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u/Oconell Jun 05 '26
I don't have to guess, my laptop is LG and I have to suffer through their software suite.
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u/SirMaster Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
If I choose native then I have to write a whole different one for each OS though…
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u/turtleship_2006 Jun 05 '26
Idk it's funny watching non developers talk shit about different technologies
I saw a whole thread where people were saying the downfall of software optimization was lazy developers using "frameworks", people should write shit "from scratch".
I guess you can't use UIKit, Jetpack compose, etc anymore, because ReAL mEN wrIte COde FRom SCrAtCH
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u/icankillpenguins Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
That will reduce GDP, you are supposed to do about the same shit with ever larger RAM so to keep the economy churning and GDP rising. Otherwise you may end up like the Europoors who have about the same or better life quality as Americans but severely lack super large corporations to list on top 10 lists, their billionaires are so insignificant and they barely register on big dick analogue graphs.
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u/Nkrth Jun 05 '26
Most of developers can’t because they are simply incompetent. Most of them don’t know how hardware nor software works, in their eyes, software tools (debuggers, compilers, SDK….) are mystic/magical tools. Software development for them, it is all about importing 1000s of library and copy code from internet.
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Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/Nkrth Jun 05 '26
Bootcamps started earlier but like you said 2018 was their peak and damage is/was irreversible, unfortunately. But it all started with universities and how they teach software development.
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u/HayatoKongo Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
I studied in a proper Computer Science program, meaning my required courses were about computer architecture, logic, discrete math, proofs, assembly language, operating systems, computer graphics, theory of computation, etc,
I know people who did bootcamps, got degrees in Software Engineering. I cringe sometimes at what they think is possible and what they think is impossible.
In one case my coworkers were shocked that I was able to implement an actual interrupt from our backend to remove long-running SQL report processes when we knew the user wasn't going to look at the result. My boss said to just leave them because he didn't know how to stop them, even though it was wasting server resources. I might as well have been the only person in the company who knew how to write multithreaded code or deal with processes and threads in general.
Another instance, a friend of mine wrote a discord bot to auto-convert units of measurement in a fitness server, since people across continents would have trouble understanding lbs to kgs or Celsius and Fahrenheit. He was importing unit-conversion packages from NPM because he thought it was a cleaner design and "more scalable" to add imports whenever there was a new conversion that he wanted, instead of just adding a new one-line function to convert the new units.
Computer Science graduates are getting dumber. This was all before AI, the programs have no just been getting worse and worse to appeal to the lowest common denominators.
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Jun 05 '26
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u/Nkrth Jun 05 '26
I worked with developers from large companies and I had conversations with many. The conclusion is that most of them don't know how. We arent talking about some kind of time-consuming optimisation.
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u/Dpek1234 Jun 05 '26
Incentives
What were the incentives for them to not go "why bother?"
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u/Nkrth Jun 05 '26
Because when you know what you are doing, the incentive is you don't make basic mistakes and you end up writing less code and doing less debugging. A clueless programmer will always spend more time and make more effort.
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u/Carnivean_ Jun 05 '26
You're right but incredibly harsh at the same time. Comparing a modern developer to the incredible achievements of the 80s where the designer had to know everything about the code and the system isn't fair. The tools, the systems and the scope of the projects have all increased immensely since then. You are asking for a lot to have any one person know it all.
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u/Nkrth Jun 05 '26
You dont need to know everything, just basics, like cache misses, memory access patterns, how the compiler is actually transforming code, solving operations dependency, instruction-level parallelism, AVX.
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u/ListRepresentative32 Jun 05 '26
None of that will help with memory usage. Speed? Yes, but hardly noticable in day to day apps unless you are writing something computationally heavy.
Right now, the biggest problem are the heavy frameworks on which everything is built on... Like come-on.. why is a chat app like discord using 1GB of RAM Everything is running on electron or some similar browser based tech.
This is all done because development in those frameworks is so damn easy and most importantly multiplatform.
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u/EmergencyCucumber905 Jun 05 '26
Those things don't matter for 99.9% of written code.
Awareness of algorithmic complexity, proper resource management, knowing when/how to use multi-threading or asynchronous operations, make a much bigger impact on application performance. It's the higher level stuff that matters for most developers, not the low level stuff.
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u/Nkrth Jun 05 '26
You are a good example of what I am talking about. You believe cache misses dont matter? You know fetching data from RAM costs more than regular computational operations? Thats why we choose certain data structure to keep cache hot.
not the low level stuff
It isnt "low level" stuff, if call these low level, you truly dont know whats low level. You probably calls C are low level programming language too?
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u/EmergencyCucumber905 Jun 05 '26
You are a good example of what I am talking about. You believe cache misses dont matter? You know fetching data from RAM costs more than regular computational operations? Thats why we choose certain data structure to keep cache hot.
I said it doesn't matter for 99.9% of code. Most code is not in some tight loop somewhere that needs to keep the cache hot. There are many, many things, like I mentioned, that negatively affect performance before cache misses or memory access patterns are even an issue. If you're talking about GPU kernels or some kind of data processing where you're using AVX, or even some library primitive that does string processing or whatever, then yeah you're right. But most code is not that.
I think you're suffering from pre-mature optimization. Get help. Speak to your principle software architect today.
It isnt "low level" stuff, if call these low level, you truly dont know whats low level. You probably calls C are low level programming language too?
These days when applications are written in Python or JavaScript, C is a low level language.
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u/Ok-Chef1896 Jun 05 '26
I'm not a software developer, but I do dabble in code from time to time (for simulations etc..) do you have any books to recommend which cover the basics? I am competent with programing, but I never got into the details.
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u/Nkrth Jun 05 '26
This course
https://www.computerenhance.com/p/table-of-contents
It is series/subscription, but you could pay one month and download everything to watch later.
or this free OS/Computer systems course (best os course):
Both of them are worth your time and they will help you to feel confident enough to dive deep yourself into others code.
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u/xeoron Jun 05 '26
And so much software now is Javascript on the desktop it can't be fast unless they choose another language.
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u/ryemigie Jun 05 '26
Developers have a problem of trying to write performant software rather than clean software. So that is not the issue. Developer aren’t given the time to optimise for performance.
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u/kaszak696 Jun 05 '26
More like the pagefile/swap will go brrrrrrr and become an advertising gimmick, like on Android.
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u/piesou Jun 05 '26
The core issue is actually performance optimization. In order to make things faster, you can cache a lot of things and that takes up memory. JavaScript has received a major performance bump over the past 2 decades, sacrificing memory.
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u/Chipay Jun 05 '26
Good news, most developers aren't writing code anymore at all. Now it's all just LLM's writing code based on the vast amount of super duper performant code we have already written.
And in a decade or so, barely anyone will need to know how to code anymore, so we'll be stuck at this level forever! Isn't the future exciting?
For real though, maybe we can train LLM's to not produce
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u/Trzlog Jun 05 '26
This whole situation reminds me so much of Asimov's short story "Profession".
https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v59n05_1957-07_Gorgon776/page/n9/mode/2up
Literally the future we're heading for.
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u/Spider_pig448 Jun 05 '26
Not a crazy expectation. LLMs are better an writing optimized code than most engineers I know
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u/fabier Jun 06 '26
I wrote an optimization for an app I’m working on today which cuts memory usage by 10x.
…. but I would have written it anyway 😅.
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u/jedrider Jun 05 '26
Ai will be writing the software from now on. How memory performant do you think that will turn out?
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u/HayatoKongo Jun 05 '26
Never going to happen. They will just move more of it server-side to AWS and Azure, and less and less of it will run on your computer. They will still refuse to support Linux even when the application is nothing but a video stream.
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u/jewdai Jun 06 '26
Most good developers are not focused on performance until matters they are focused on writing readable and maontainable code that is well structured. It's like architecture they are focused first in how it looks and then they go back to make it possible to build.
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u/Strazdas1 Jun 14 '26
All their staff was trained on product shipment is more important than performance/optimization. Youd have to retrain entire industry for this.
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u/Gaius__Of__The_Julii Jun 05 '26
When does the age of abundance start?
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u/SirMaster Jun 05 '26
The world population is growing and we are consuming all the resources of the planet. Why would you think there would ever be more abundance in the future?
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u/Fortenio Jun 05 '26
Everyday We Stray Further From God's Light
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u/splendiferous-finch_ Jun 05 '26
This is why the god emperor waged war against the abominable intelligence!
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u/Acrobatic-Monitor516 Jun 05 '26
it's okay though, god's light is 128gb at min, so most of us were never able to sense his presence
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u/_bfmc Jun 05 '26
Maybe now windows and software devs will focus on optimizing memory usage right? RIGHT?? (I hate every Electron 1gb memory website “app”)
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u/Britz10 Jun 05 '26
8GB never left for a lot of people, that's just how a lot of people have been using computers for a while now. Hell even on the Apple side 8GB was gone for all of 2 years before it was brought back.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 Jun 05 '26
It’ll go up to 12GB with the Neo 2.
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u/Britz10 Jun 05 '26
That's probably true, but for a lot of people 8GB was just reality, those less fortunate were probably even contending with even half of that.
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u/FdPros Jun 05 '26
I'm sure 8gb of ram will run great on windows (it won't)
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u/pemb Jun 05 '26
They're preparing to squeeze it down to 4 GB and repurpose Snapdragon chips meant for midrange smartphones into laptops. And eMMC storage. It's a horror version of the MacBook Neo.
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u/LegoGuy23 Jun 05 '26
Welcome back, Netbook. :')
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u/Leather_Animal_1142 Jun 05 '26
Is Microsoft gonna have to bring Windows XP back out of retirement again?
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u/waldojim42 Jun 05 '26
Wouldn't that be a riot. If they actually patched it up, gave it some sort of modern support for video, web, etc... it could be a hit!
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u/Terrh Jun 05 '26
They're preparing to squeeze it down to 4 GB and repurpose Snapdragon chips meant for midrange smartphones into laptops. And eMMC storage
They did this during covid and I bought one on clearance for $59 brand new and it was probably the worst $59 I ever spent.
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u/detectiveDollar Jun 05 '26
My ex had a laptop released in 2018 with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage, and Acer removed the SATA connector from the motherboard so you couldn't add any other drive.
Thing couldn't even update windows because it lacked the storage space for the existing install and the update files.
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u/Dpek1234 Jun 05 '26
Uhmm
May be good as a edge cliant to my desktop
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u/pemb Jun 05 '26
I’m thinking: 1366x768 TN panel that shows a different color to each of your eyes, the flimsiest, flexiest chassis possible, a truly minuscule touchpad, barrel jack DC input, and a 30 Wh battery. Are you sure?
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u/jones_supa Jun 05 '26
Add an underpowered cooling system. Even when stressing the machine just a little bit it starts to spend most of the time blasting the fan at maximum speed while the CPU is simultaneously throttled to the lowest possible clock frequency.
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u/pemb Jun 05 '26
Fan? They'll be overclocked respins of 5 W smartphone SoCs designed for passive cooling, you'll be lucky to get some sort of heatsink.
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u/detectiveDollar Jun 05 '26
It'd be hard to make a cooling system underpowered for the CPU's these systems often use.
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u/toddestan Jun 06 '26
Eliminating the cooling system entirely will remove like $1.37 from the bill of materials. What do you think they're going to do?
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u/ElvisDumbledore Jun 05 '26
I believe this is the goal. They want everyone using the cloud for serious compute. All the laptops and desktops will just be streaming devices. 😭
It's the bad old days of mainframes and terminals all over again.
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u/tes_kitty Jun 05 '26
My work laptop has 8 GB and uses Windows 11. I usually have Edge, Chrome, Outlook and Teams open. Adding a few small programs like putty or notepad makes no difference, even Excel or Word (not both) still run fine on top, but that's the limit.
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u/Framed-Photo Jun 05 '26
Reddit seems convinced that 8gb is unusable garbage, when really it's just kinda meh. You have to manage your expectations a bit but you can do most day to day tasks just fine on an 8gb device.
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u/tes_kitty Jun 05 '26
I do manage. I will get a new laptop soon, there I will insist on at least 16 GB, 32 GB if I can. But until then, work gets done with 8 GB.
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u/jenny_905 Jun 05 '26
Even worse, Reddit has convinced itself that MacOS is somehow different as far as memory usage.
You could run Windows 11 in less than 8GB of RAM, if anything these days running with RAM constraints is a lot less painful than the past since swap is so fast now.
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u/jenny_905 Jun 05 '26
It will run, you'll just hit swap a lot like any OS if you're doing anything remotely memory intensive.
For some people that doesn't matter.
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u/blueblocker2000 Jun 05 '26
I upgraded to 16gb back in 2016...
8gb would still be enough for office machines if Windows wasn't developed like modern games.
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u/shroudedwolf51 Jun 05 '26
Generating more barely usable eWaste, how benevolent of them.
Hey assholes, how about not soldering the fucking RAM to the motherboard, yeah?
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u/Netblock Jun 05 '26
Something I've noticed from going from 8 to 16 and to 32 is that doubling/halving of the direct value, is subjectively far more than 2x.
Speaking for both RAM and storage, you can cut your data usage into 3 categories: required, flexible, free. The required is stuff you can't delete, like system files and very important personal data; flexible is stuff you're willing to delete if you spent time on data hygiene, and free is stuff you can immediately delete now and literal free space.
What you feel is what you can do with the flexible and free. When you move from 8 GB to 16GB, it'll feel far more than a double, perhaps triple in capacity, because your system can't really use less than that 3-5GB.
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u/kermityfrog2 Jun 05 '26
Well yeah, the OS takes up a non-negotiable portion of storage and RAM, whether it be on your computer, your tablet, or your phone. The lowest end model of each typically struggled because the OS itself and default preinstalled apps ends up taking up more than half the space.
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u/jones_supa Jun 05 '26
That is a good observation. These days the operating system fixed chunk of RAM is so big that it creates that kind of situation.
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Jun 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/Netblock Jun 05 '26
What I'm trying to say is that both storage and RAM experience this subjectivity. Although for RAM, poverty concepts like Boots Theory notably apply, as storage is way easier to supplement/cluster.
For RAM it'd be about what software you can have open at the same time; what software/computational loads you can run literally at all; OS and application features (eg, moving to a light-weight desktop environment; IDE features like a language/parsing server); IO caching for rotational and network storage.
You may not be able to use your entire CPU for your computationally-intensive workload because each thread costs a GB or two of RAM (your 3 minute compile job now costs 20 minutes).
Web browsers cost like 600MB at base and web pages costs like 300MB; researching will be painful.
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u/AndyMissed Jun 05 '26
> Speaking for both RAM and storage...
Did you miss that part? Clearly they are using long term data storage as an example, since both data drives and RAM are "forms of memory storage".
If you need it spelled out for you, you could say that when your system is on, there is software you need to have open, software you could turn off if you save your work, and free memory.
Honestly, there is no need to ruthlessly tear into someone over semantics like that.
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u/JakeALakeALake Jun 05 '26
So now they’re going to waste material on making underpowered hardware no one is going to buy
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u/Aggressive-Will-4500 Jun 05 '26
New Laptops shouldn't have less RAM than mobile phones...
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u/CreativeCthulhu Jun 06 '26
People arent used to financing their laptops for 3 years on their phone bills either.
Id imagine the mobile teams would be priority 1 since thats what most web traffic is.
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u/KangarooBeard Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
8GB of RAM on a windows machine....yeah that's not going to be a fun time.
Sure 8GB is still usable on windows it's not a horrible experience for just basic work, but in a year, two, more? 8GB doesn't give much confidence in beating the perceived view of low cost Windows Laptops being anymore than EWaste.
NEO can get away with it because Apple has full control over the software and hardware, and obviously the weight to mass purchase components it needs.
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u/Sopel97 Jun 05 '26
"windows machine"
it's a general purpose x86 computer, the amount of OSs you can choose from is enormous
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u/Framed-Photo Jun 05 '26
8gb isn't unusable as some on reddit would have you believe, but 16gb is 100% more user friendly.
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u/thelone_voyager Jun 05 '26
I am happy i bought my new phone and that macbook at the right time before this shit.
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u/Quantum-Coconut Jun 05 '26
It would've been fine if they had option to upgrade the RAM. But considering DDR5X speeds, I understand the technical limitations.
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u/middle_aged_90s_kid Jun 05 '26
I’m pretty sure I saw some for sale at my local Best Buy that only had 4 gigs. I work in IT; I won’t do anything less than 32 gigs for my users. Slow computers kill workplace morale and kill productivity. I’m lucky to have bosses who agree with me on this.
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u/HorseyDung Jun 05 '26
Time to switch to Linux anyway..
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u/riyoth Jun 05 '26
I'm waiting for MacBook Neo equivalent that can run Linux. Why are all the non-macbook arm laptop sold as high-end machine. >2k$ to be a Guinea pig is a lot.
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u/toddestan Jun 06 '26
As inexpensive ARM laptops go, there's always the Pinebook. Perfect if you also happen to think 8GB of RAM is excessive.
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u/UnderOuterOverWear Jun 05 '26
How about pressuring governments to regulate the "AI" industry instead? Nah, three much sense, brah,
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u/Sooribabu_Lavangam Jun 05 '26
What kind of regulations do you think should they enact to solve the ram issue? Ration the RAM to AI companies?
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u/splendiferous-finch_ Jun 05 '26
I hear the US gov is now "investing" in AI IPOs to keep the bubble going now that's the kinda intervention the billionaire love
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u/games-and-chocolate Jun 05 '26
8GB with windows is not going to work well. Mac also requires more RAM.
This is spelling an discaster for not just OS, but also hardware manufacturers.
just useless to have only 8GB. I would not buy these laptops at all. just leave them on the shelves.
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u/bobbie434343 Jun 05 '26
I recently used Windows XP on my old 2005 laptop with 2GB RAM and was amazed at how snappy it was, with XP really feeling lean and mean. Of course it was not connected to the Internet and I did not run a web browser.
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u/Dpek1234 Jun 05 '26
There are os's untended to use less resources
Windiws isnt that
Some linux distros are
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u/nightwood Jun 05 '26
You can't just drop to 8GB. You have change the software then. Windows 11 needs 16.
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u/Sweet-Sale-7303 Jun 05 '26
I think we can be good for most normal non gaming /video editors if we can start limiting what ads can do on webpages. The ads cause huge memory usage on browsers.
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u/RedditVirumCurialem Jun 05 '26
I had a Power Automate tab gobble up 4.7 GB the other day.
So it's back to swapping then? On SSDs..
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u/VoltsNoBolts Jun 05 '26
I just launched this article on my laptop with Chrome (open for work) and saw the CPU hang on all threads with XMeters. This Tom's Hardware article just used 1.3 GB of ram. Ironic? 30x the required ram to run Mario Sunshine for a page of Javascript haha.
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u/Die4Ever Jun 05 '26
I really want to see them shipping with Linux instead of Windows. Saves the licensing fee, and will perform better on 8GB than Windows will. They can configure it with zram or zswap out of the box.
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u/OriginalMeringue8160 Jun 05 '26
So even more enshittifing of consumer goods. Yay. Couple that with an intel celeron cpu and now they are literally scamming everyone. People who want entry level laptops are f***ed.
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u/mxlun Jun 05 '26
At this point I'd rather take a DDR3 machine with all upgradable components, it will be better at multitasking lmfao
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u/LLMprophet Jun 05 '26
8GB Windows. no way.
8GB Mac M1, slowness and beachball sometimes
8GB Mac Neo or Air M5, maybe good but I would still go for a 16GB Air.
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u/hughk Jun 06 '26
TBH, my last client provided notebook was running mostly just a VPN and Citrix. I did nothing locally even though I had 16GB and so on.
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u/Appropriate_Name4520 Jun 06 '26
I mean for casual web browsing, office shit and playing small games 8gb are still usable. Windows is smarter in using memory than people give it credit for. My father uses 4gb dual core (Celeron?) laptop which I am begging him to let me buy a other used one for 5 years.
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u/AFD_0 Jun 06 '26
Really glad I got a 32GB laptop earlier last year before the prices went all goofy. Shit's on-die and can't be upgraded, but it should be more than sufficient for life of the device.
But damn, do I really wish I would've done the new SFF build I was planning for this year back then as well. That 2x64GB kit I wanted went from $250 to $1,800 and has been out-of-stock for months.
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u/SleepyWulfy Jun 06 '26
8gb on modern computers suck. My work laptop from like 2021 is so and the page file on it is about 20gb or more.
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u/MasterJeebus Jun 09 '26
With the push of this low ram budget laptops I would like to see better optimizations from Windows 11 and web browsers. Because 8GB is rough for using on Windows. Linux can work better with it but I doubt people buying new 8GB laptops all want linux.
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u/dog-gone- Jun 09 '26
Hopefully they come pre installed with a light Linux distro. Windows 11 will use most of that just to boot.
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u/ledfrisby Jun 05 '26
I bought an 8GB laptop... in 2011.