Do it. I know which OS will run fine on 8G of RAM and which one won’t.
I wouldn’t be happy with 8 GB of RAM regardless of OS.
Same, I am often about 8 GB of RAM with my daily usage.
Debian keeps barfing on me with 16.
Heh, I have 64 and still can run out. Teams and Outlook for work, one or two java projects in IntelliJ, rust project in Neovim… try to build and run tests with maven and I’m at 70-80% easily. Couple more tabs like discord and I’m out of memory.
I feel that. My new workstation will have 128 GB, I’m very excited about it
Nor would I, but if apps were actually optimized instead of the Electron nonsense we have now we’d be in a better place. I really hope this forces us to finally build better again instead of relying on infinite resources.
Someone’s smelling the year of the desktop
I built a gaming PC last year with 32gb, and it’s time to upgrade my MacBook…
So, logically, I just moved my workflow to my desktop. I would say dual boot for the win… but honestly most of my games run great on Linux, so I think I’m just good there until and unless this blows over.
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.
Linux adoption… accelerates
I run fedora on 8GB and find it functional but definitely not comfortable. Anything past a dozen tabs and it starts getting choked up.
You’re thinking of CP/M, right?
Can CP/M address >= 2^32 bytes?
CP/M-86, maybe.
Hah, guess they’re gonna have to run Linux. Windows 11 would choke on 8 GB RAM.
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.
I have to use windows at work, have 32gb and regularly get browser tabs unloaded for low memory. I’m not running VMs or anything. Usually just Firefox, visual studio, and slack.
Personal computer is Linux with 16gb and that’s more than enough.
Same here. Modern 32 gb machine from work is a slog. 2 minutes from wake to actually working, can be 10 seconds just to use the start menu sometimes. Older thinkpad with 16gb and linux/cosmic desktop - wakes almost instantly and perfectly snappy for most things.
I have 64gb 32 for vm and 32 for host, security software eats it all. I pity the poor bastards on the 8gb work laptops. My project is funded separately from all the others so we got to order our own laptops. Our previous laptops sucked at 32gb total.
Most bloated apps like outlook and teams etc regularly use nearly a gig of ram each in my experience. Brutal.
I have single browser tabs that regularly suck down a whole gig. (And they still have input lag).
Ya that depends on the content too and what bullshit they load on the background. In this context, these days I look at tabs as apps lol
an 8gb pc with win11 is today’s equivalent of running vista on 1gb.
So RAM costs them more now, and they need to pass those costs onto customers. However, it seems like they’re also trying to redefine what “mid-range” means to us all, as if we aren’t fully aware of what computers are capable of and what amount of memory is good vs not. Making the various ranges cost more is intuitive. Enshitifying the ranges to sell them at the same price is just antithetical to the whole concept of the ranges…
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…
Maybe this will be a boon. The entire reason the ram requirements got so high as it is is because software optimization was put on the back burner. Maybe a ram shortage where people can’t obtain the ram needed will force the big name software devs to start being more frugal with ram. (talking to you chrome… whom currently is using 2 gigs alone just trying to show a twitch stream…)
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.
Large computing will exist solely in the cloud where you will pay a subscription for it. Can’t have these grubbing consumers buy anything we elites don’t get a monthly cut of.
I wish this was sarcasm.
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.
I’m positive its a bad thing. It will mean the end of ownership. Our children will be born and their only worth with be as consumers for which they can crushed for any reason the owners see fit. Its slavery and feudalism nothing more nothing less.
Vasectomy
Sounds like a really good decision for you.
It’s neat that AI is already ruining the world in really tangible ways.
Soldered in, or upgradeable at least? The former would be a huge reason to never buy the newest gen of laptops.
EDIT: Missed in article, yeah this would suck if they stick to soldered RAM for ultra-thins.
Another problem manufacturers face is with notebooks that ship with soldered DRAM. In particular, ultrathin designs would need to be revamped to modify their configurations.
Those soldered low RAM ones are going to be in the dump a lot sooner.
Literally manufactured for the garbage dump.
lmao of course it’s gonna be soldered in to push you to higher tiers
deleted by creator
“WHY IS IT SO SLOW?!?!?!”
Time to switch to Linux people lol. Windows is barely usable on 8GB these days.
And set up ZRAM.
ZRAM is real. Even on computers with lots of ram it lets the os compress and tuck away memory that a process is hoarding. When I start using android studio all these long-running election process get 1/2 their memory swapped out to disk, and evidently they never really needed it because days later I still see lots of their memory swapped out.
What’s ZRAM?
Let’s see how this plays out with windows 11 😄
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.
Often the people that buy those tiers of computers don’t know enough about memory to know how limited they’d be.
better start removing AI from Windows then… holy fucj my 16gb is barely holding up with windows11 that in forced to use on my work PC. slow as BALLS, it’s just raping the entire system performance constantly
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.
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.
Don’t worry, you’ll just need to subscribe to My Windows Copilot Cloud+ to get access to a virtual PC with plenty of RAM from anywhere! It’ll be powerful enough you’ll barely notice us logging all your actions and blocking anything we don’t like.
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…
8 GIGABYTES!!? How am I supposed to load a mouse driver in THAT!?
You don’t need to load the mouse driver on your laptop. We have a subscription service for it!
Cool! Is the scroll wheel split into up and down services?
5 cents per scroll. Because pennies are over.
Seems reasonable. Can I buy left and right click separately as monthly subscriptions?
Boy was I wrong about modern computing, it’s all so powerful and useful!
We’ll trim it down so the mouse driver only has a little AI.
Why not just tell me to go fuck myself and skip the unsatisfying foreplay?
Does midrange being at 8GB mean that entry level will be 4GB? because I know corpos are gonna be corpos.
(I don’t think windows even run at 4GB lmfao)
Edit: Also, this RAM shortage might force people to use Linux 😁
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.
Yeah, this could spell the end for local installs of Microsoft office. Gdocs and o365 for everyone. Not sure if thats a win or loss.
I see it wholly as a loss, because it advances the idea of subscriptions for anything and everything, and Microsoft will be right there on the front lines taking advantage of the new revenue stream (so losing local installs won’t hurt them at all and is what they’re going for).
I wonder how long it will take before people realize it’s cheaper to own your own hardware than lease compute time from a cloud provider? I’ve seen this same cycle with cloud VMs, I expect this will be no different.
They won’t, ever. Not the general public, at least. Most are still perfectly content and onboard with paying for 10 different streaming services for music/movies/TV. Only immediate numbers mean anything, and $5/mo is better than $10 once, simply because 10 is larger than 5. Plus, look at all this extra shit I didn’t want that is included!
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.
For the price of 16GB?
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
Oh you sweet summer child. It will almost surely be soldered to the board so that you’ll have to pay extra upfront or buy a new laptop if you want more RAM.
