A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
$1300 for a computer that will be able to do nothing but choke on its own face. Great job, world at large, great fucking job.
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.
Microsoft jumped the shark a while ago. They are more into selling shit any way they can, rather than doing progressive development.
I never really considered it outside of the TPM nonsense, but I bet the ram crisis will be responsible for a chunk of people putting Linux on their windows machines.
I just converted an old laptop last night to try it out. But it's more due to every windows update breaking something more so than the ram, but yes my 16 gig system is already struggling in games and I don't need the extra bloat anyway.
I beat the rush by a couple months. I have a i7-6700 in a HPz240 SFF that is clearly faster than some of the Celeron / i3 units that were OK'd by MS and the EOS for Win10 pushed me to Linux. Works well. I have 32GB of RAM in this machine, so it's likely to last quite a few more years before it really becomes too slow for Linux.
Using win 11 with 8gb of ram should be the sentence for nonviolent crimes
Cruel and unusual
clearly they've optimized their software, right?
Optimized for slop.
Sloptimized!
Meanwhile, my old Linux laptop is chugging along quite happily with 2GB.
That's actually...impressive
What do you typically use it for though? My PC is central to the media I consume, the games I play and as a creative outlet. I don't think I'd be able to use most of the tools I enjoy with such little memory.
It's not my main workstation or gaming PC, which is probably why 2GB is plenty comfortable enough.
Light web browsing, printing stuff, word processing, running presentations at my writer's group, occasionally running a Game Boy emulator or playing a video ... never anything particularly demanding. I only use it when I need the portability, because otherwise why would I want to do things hunched over a tiny laptop?
All very light uses, sure ... but for that kind of stuff, it does great. Feels responsive and snappy pretty much all the time, despite being a shitty old Chromebook from 2016.
This statement is fundamentally wrong. Asking enterprise users to settle for 8GB of memory in a premium $1,299 machine in 2026 is the definition of trading off performance and will tarnish the Surface brand’s reputation for long-term reliability.
In what world are surfaces reliable? All I hear from people who get them from work are what absolute pieces of shit these things are.
My surface pro is okay whenever I have to take a windows laptop to a job site. The unreliability comes from Windows 11, but the hardware has been fine.
Hell you can have an overspec’d gaming PC and Windows still sucks the life out of it.
I use a Surface Pro 9, I bought it new specifically to install Linux on it.
Uninstalled Windows 11 one hour after it's first bootup and installed Fedora on it, and I am pretty sure most of it's problems are caused by Windows. On Linux, it is stone cold and dead silent when I am browsing the web, editing text, programming etc. I get about 6 hours of freedom when I got VSCodium and some browser windows open.
For sub 5 minute multicore workloads, the metal case eats all that heat up fairly quickly and I can say the device has very good thermal design. Though it does heat up to "hurts to touch" temperatures when I got hour long heavy workloads like compiling the linux kernel, I did expect that because it is an Intel after all.
I don't really mind overheating since I don't hold the device in my hands when I am compiling a giant project, what matters is that it doesn't heat up in my hands when I am watching movies and stuff.
Plus; my favourite desktop GNOME is wonderful on touchscreens, I love their HIG, it is so comfortable. I can't imagine the poor souls having to navigate Windows UI on a touchscreen.
I find it strange how unwilling Microsoft is to be price competitive with Apple. It really shouldn't be that difficult to price comparably to apple
Apple spent decades perfecting their hardware production while Microsoft relied on third party sellers to create devices that would run Windows. Why would you expect their hardware to be comparable at this point? They’re primarily a software company and their software is also bad
In the current environment? Apple shielded itself from price hikes by component suppliers by locking up capacity early. There's a reason why their CEO came up through the supply chain rather than software or design.
The memory Apple is putting in its devices today are largely priced at prices negotiated years ago. It got deals on CPUs and GPUs of their own design, fabricated by TSMC, packaged with Samsung-fabricated memory in System-in-a-Package form, at volumes that make them nearly impossible to say no to, under contracts that are probably bulletproof even as TSMC and Samsung have others clamoring for their capacity at higher prices.
The A18 Pro in the MacBook Neos is made on TSMC's N3E node, which started production in 2023 and was probably under contract by 2022. The AI boom largely started happening after, and the memory/storage chip crunch didn't seem like it would be a problem until 2024 or so.
In an environment like this where there are capacity shortages and companies bidding up the price to absurd levels, companies like Apple are exactly who you'd expect not to be thrown around by price hikes.
I see your point there, but Surface's have been priced higher than Mac's for many years now (and typically for more outdated hardware), before the AI bubble destroyed memory pricing
Greedy cunt fucks gotta greedy cunt fuck.
Holy shit, they launched a new 4 gig machine in 2022‽
I've been looking up used laptops lately.
I can get a lenovo carbon from 7-8 years ago with 16Gb RAM for 200€.
About 6 months ago I scored a ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen (2018) with 16GB RAM on eBay for £80 (~$110)
I was extremely happy with that catch.
Used business machines beat the pants off new consumer stuff any day.
Now you can have a slow computer that dies in exactly 6 months.
That's alright, you can just buy another one!
I was happy with my 16gb until I went to make a small edit to something in Starfield and saw the system requirements for the toolset needs 32gb just to load the core game's master files. Without even trying to open the 3D graphical view of a map cell or any DLC esms, it easily takes 12-14gb just to have the damn .esm loaded in.
Microsoft can fuck right off! Thank you very much.
Well, you know what naturally floats on the surface...
