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Microsoft pushed 16GB RAM as must-have for Windows 11 for years, now sells an 8GB Surface Laptop for $1,299
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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They never change. I used to repair laptops for a well known laptop brand, this was around the release of Windows Vista, 2006 or so.
We were getting a lot of warranty repairs where the issue was "laptop slow" or words to that effect. The only issue with them was that they didn't have enough ram to run Vista smoothly enough. The whole system chugged. But as there was nothing wrong with the laptops, we'd send them back to the customer largely untouched saying "buy more ram."
At some point, a couple of suits from the company came to look around the warehouse and meet the team. I was primary diagnostic at this point, so I would inspect most of the laptops and confirm their issues. I was getting around 15 laptops a day at this point that were just low ram for Vista, so I asked the suits "why do we sell laptops with Vista that can't run it properly as they don't have enough ram?"
His response was that "Microsoft sets the specs of the laptops. Nothing we can do."
Ah, Vista. My "ready for Vista" laptop finally convinced me to try out this Ubuntu Linux people were talking about, and although I dual booted for a few years, by 2009 I never had Windows on one of my own devices again.
The Vista rollout was so bad.
My workplace got a bunch of new laptops that didn't have Vista-compatible sound card drivers.
"Microsoft sets the specs of the laptops. Nothing we can do."
Then... Send them physically to Microsoft service Center?
Microsoft doesn't set the spec; the manufacturer can always add more spec if they want to!
But what Microsoft does (did?) do is to provide extremely cheap OEM Windows licenses to vendors who made laptops with a certain maximum spec - that spec for a long time being 4GB RAM max and 14" screen max.
That's why all the cheap brand-new Windows laptops you saw on the market were basically the same identical crap with the same shit specs.
Tbf, the 4GB ram limit was partially due to 32-bit architecture still being so prevalent at the time
Maybe, but what it was mainly was market segregation in Windows licensing.
Microsoft wants even the cheapest lowest-end devices to ship with Windows because that improves their market penetration, but at the same time they don't want to lose money by reducing the price OEMs pay for Windows licenses in general.
So Microsoft basically told manufacturers "Okay we'll give you super cheap licenses to keep your cost down so you can sell to the budget market, but only on super bottom-end devices. On more expensive machines you'll still pay the full license price"
Which basically resulted in manufacturers all trying to squeeze the most mileage out of that spec cap they could.