Hah, guess they’re gonna have to run Linux. Windows 11 would choke on 8 GB RAM.
Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices
Submitted 2 weeks ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
tomkatt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
FosterMolasses@leminal.space 2 weeks ago
lmaooooo
bananabread@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It’s the year of the Linux desktop!
themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
Buckshot@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Most bloated apps like outlook and teams etc regularly use nearly a gig of ram each in my experience. Brutal.
relativestranger@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
an 8gb pc with win11 is today’s equivalent of running vista on 1gb.
some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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…
some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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…
Digit@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Can see that happening, in this fake economy.
Zephorah@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
Isn’t the issue here the newest generation? I keep reading there 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.
some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So our generation will be the first to have to teach both our boomer parents AND our millennial offspring what “RAM” is?!
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Maybe this will be a boon. The entire reason the ram requirements got so high as it is is because devs got lazy and stopped optimizing stuff. 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…)
MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
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!”
CCMan1701A@startrek.website 2 weeks ago
Idk, trying to load up a couple spreadsheets in Edge is going to consume 8gb of Ram in no time.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Oh fucking hell…
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
That would still pressure the browser teams to work on memory optimizations.
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Honestly, it’ll be more efficient to have memory in a datacenter in that hardware in a datacenter will see higher average capacity utilization, but it’s gonna drive up datacenter prices too.
kieron115@startrek.website 2 weeks ago
At least one studio, Larian, has confirmed this is the case for them. thegamer.com/larian-divinity-development-changed-…
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Good fuck studios just throwing optimization into the bin cause they can. They should fucking actually do some problem solving instead of brute forcing everything.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Tried that yesterday, 2.6 GB for just that one tab playing a twitch stream. That’s honestly impressive.
Lawnman23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Keeping it positive, nice.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
In the world of AI vibe coding, I don’t think so, they will push people even more towards web apps I think
relativestranger@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
that would require the software companies to actually spend money on competent developers instead of tossing peanuts at prompt writers.
Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
It’s neat that AI is already ruining the world in really tangible ways.
Scrollone@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
8 GB of RAM would be enough if every fucking application didn’t use Electron.
sudoer777@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Or web applications, Firefox/Chrome uses like 32 GB RAM
sexy_peach@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Not for me on linux
sibachian@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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.
Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Soldered in, or upgradeable at least? The former would be a huge reason to never buy the newest gen of laptops.
ThisGuyThat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Those soldered low RAM ones are going to be in the dump a lot sooner.
Zephorah@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
They do not care about the planned obsolescence of it all.
doboprobodyne@mathstodon.xyz 2 weeks ago
Excellent. Hopefully some of them will have hardware that supports #openBSD that I can pick up for pennies on the dollar. I believe the #thinkpad x1 carbon is already on soldered RAM. I can see many in the #Linux crowd stand to profit handsomely from this, given their much more broad hardware support 😜
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Literally manufactured for the garbage dump.
isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
lmao of course it’s gonna be soldered in to push you to higher tiers
Chronographs@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Probably single channel too because of course
tym@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I speak on behalf of all IT Support personnel everywhere when I say “fuck you”
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“WHY IS IT SO SLOW?!?!?!”
InFerNo@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Let’s see how this plays out with windows 11 😄
thejml@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Windows 2000/ME
One is good, but slower, the other is more buggy than 98SE, but a bit faster. Not much in common between them other than year.
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I donlt think that the NVMe shortage is that big of a deal in terms of using it for swap. It’s much cheaper than DRAM per GB.
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
You could technically boot it… Not for long, and don’t open anything, but still counts, right?
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Often the people that buy those tiers of computers don’t know enough about memory to know how limited they’d be.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Time to switch to Linux people lol. Windows is barely usable on 8GB these days.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
And set up ZRAM.
NotAnArdvark@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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
Cryxtalix@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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. Yo there’s not enough ram for all this shit.
TwitchingCheese@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
If there’s one thing corporate IT is good at it’s bullshit and security theater. Can they stop corporate espionage? Of course not. Can they make it really annoying for employees to access data they need for their job: ✅
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
8 GIGABYTES!!? How am I supposed to load a mouse driver in THAT!?
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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)
Avicenna@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
lol lets fuck all other computational sciences so that people can generate cats drinking whiskey in robes de chambre.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Why not just tell me to go fuck myself and skip the unsatisfying foreplay?
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This wouldn’t be much of an issue if most of the laptops nowadays didn’t come with soldered in ram and no options of expanding.
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
mid-range laptops to 8GB
My phone has 12GB of memory, and I’m pretty sure that Android is a lot lighter on memory than the Windows 11 that I suspect a lot of these are going to be running.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For the price of 16GB?
thatonecoder@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
…and I’m still on 4 GB RAM, TROLOLOL
Cryxtalix@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
What. My six year old cheapo Acer laptop that got my broke ass through college had 16gb ram. My raspberry pi has 8gb of ram.
artyom@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
And developers will make their shitty apps more resource-efficient, right? RIGHT!?
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Guys this is good news, maybe google and mozilla will figure it out and stop making their applications the biggest ram hogs in human history, taking more ram to render a document than it takes to render a AAA game.
Jk
Rooty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Dell and Lenovo price gouge consumers
FTFY
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Will they solder it?
TheWilliamist@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Waaaayyy back in the day Dell had a real bad habit of limiting their low and midrange laptops to pitiful amounts of memory to stratify their product line even though the chipset might support more.
itsathursday@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The AI snake is finally eating its tail.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
I thought I’d be fine, that I’d buy the other 16GB stick later. Now is later, I am screwed. I had to enable the use of ALT-SysRq-f to manually invoke OOM-killer because I often run out of RAM.
8GB just feels like way too little for a new laptop. Well, maybe the absolutely cheap ones, but “mid-range”, no.
It’s crazy. A bit over a year ago I got a refurbished ThinkPad for €180 with 1x16GB of RAM. Now that RAM costs around €120.
Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
That’s going to make running anything on Windows rather uncomfortable.
Evotech@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s not even going to run chrome my guys
JTskulk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Do it. I know which OS will run fine on 8G of RAM and which one won’t.
Damarus@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I wouldn’t be happy with 8 GB of RAM regardless of OS.
uranibaba@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Same, I am often about 8 GB of RAM with my daily usage.
foggenbooty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Someone’s smelling the year of the desktop
StitchInTime@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
comador@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Minix and FreeBSD…
/runs; hides
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
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.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
No OS if fine with 8GB if you use it for anything other than browsing memes
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There’s more than that ?
toddestan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Actually, the web browser is one of the major offenders when it comes to consuming large amounts of RAM.
radioactivefunguy@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
In a single tab
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I run fedora on 8GB and find it functional but definitely not comfortable. Anything past a dozen tabs and it starts getting choked up.
antrosapien@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Linux adoption… accelerates
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re thinking of CP/M, right?
0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Can CP/M address >= 2^32 bytes?