This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
...and I'm still on 4 GB RAM, TROLOLOL
You must be using Linux.
He also must not be a gamer. Or at least not one that understands years past 2003
Nope to both of you. Windows 10 and I play Minecraft 1.8.9.
I am. I have 16 GB on my 15 year old eight-core PC, run virtual machines, and need barely half the RAM. My laptop is a Thinkpad T490 and is totally fine. My Linux phone runs fine with 5 GB right now.
Hah, guess they're gonna have to run Linux. Windows 11 would choke on 8 GB RAM.
It's the year of the Linux desktop!
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.
Most bloated apps like outlook and teams etc regularly use nearly a gig of ram each in my experience. Brutal.
It's neat that AI is already ruining the world in really tangible ways.
Time to switch to Linux people lol. Windows is barely usable on 8GB these days.
And set up ZRAM.
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 😁
Windows 11 can run on 4GB. That's the minimum for the listed requirements, and the other day, I saw Best Buy selling a 4GB model, and I see some systems for sale online. I would imagine that it's not ideal.
If I recall that 4GB min on win11 is explictedly with no applications. Including browsers.
It's only the os.
Windows 11 for me boots using around 7GB. Open a heavy browser tab or two and you're page thrashing next. I can't use a computer like that.
I have seen a few of them. Yes they are bad. Basically idles at 85% memory usage on the desktop with nothing open.
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.
So it remains shit quality even if RAM gets more affordable at some reasonable point in the future.
I boycott those.
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...)
Tried that yesterday, 2.6 GB for just that one tab playing a twitch stream. That's honestly impressive.
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!"
Oh fucking hell...
Idk, trying to load up a couple spreadsheets in Edge is going to consume 8gb of Ram in no time.
At least one studio, Larian, has confirmed this is the case for them.
When discussing the pressures the company faces when releasing a game in early access, such as audience expectations, Vincke told us, "Interestingly, another [issue Larian is facing] is really the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and f**k, man. It's like, literally, we've never had it like this."
He continued, "It kind of ruins all of your projections that you had about it because normally, you know the curves, and you can protect the hardware. It's gonna be an interesting one. It means that most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point in time. So it's challenging, but it's video games."
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.
How do you take that from the comment above?
Do it. I know which OS will run fine on 8G of RAM and which one won't.
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.
I wouldn't be happy with 8 GB of RAM regardless of OS.
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.
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…
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.
