Why not just tell me to go fuck myself and skip the unsatisfying foreplay?
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.
…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.
So you have the patience of Buddha, that’s great.
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!
lmaooooo
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.
deleted by creator
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.
What’s ZRAM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
One of the mechanisms for compressing memory in Linux. Trades CPU time for effectively having more RAM Recent versions of Fedora apparently have it on by default.
I’ve read that zswap, another mechanism, is preferable on newer systems with NVMe/SSD, where paging isn’t as painful; that only compresses pages going to swap, but requires that you actually have some swap. I haven’t used either.
Probably someone should try benchmarking them for various workloads if systems are going to be running on much less memory for a while. Was more of an edge case thing that not many people cared about, but if operating with less memory is suddenly more important, might have broader interest.
On Linux, also possible to opt for lighter-on-memory versions of a lot of software that you’re kinda committing to using the Microsoft-provided version of on Windows. File browser, compositor, etc.
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.
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.
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.
Even on an 8gb or 16gb system Windows uses over 4gb on a fresh boot. At 4gb it’s going to be swapping to fish non-stop. The disk will be thrashed and be dead in a year of use.
Windows 11 can run on 4GB
That ‘can’ does a hell of a lot of heavy lifting. But then again, it says Windows can run in 4GB, it doesn’t say anything about your apps.
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.
Windows going Vista again
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.
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.
“Oh don’t worry, you won’t have to actually load spreadsheets anymore, just give our AI full access to your files and it will do whatever you ask :)”
Ideally, you’re correct though and companies start investing in optimization. I don’t see it going that way, but a girl can dream.
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.
As a dirty commie, I agree, but unfortunately under capitalism it is just an avenue for exploitation. Large companies are deciding what we can or cannot have access to and setting the price for it in a manner completely divorced from what they’re offering.
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?
Not the person you’re responding to, but “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” indicates to me that optimization was not a top priority. It’s not unusual for people to optimize after a proof of concept or something, but I imagine in gaming (I don’t do game dev admittedly) you don’t want that too late in the process. If they’re not planning on having it in early access, then their early consistent user base will be more worried about other things. If min spec is 8 then people with 4 won’t get it or won’t complain about poor performance because technically it’s their machine that’s the issue. Lack of complaints about that and feedback about other things further shifts the priority away from optimization. Plus, anyone who’s worked in dev spaces or probably any kind of deliverable knows that there are things that just don’t happen despite your best intentions. Things like optimization are the first to go in the dev space, so by openly admitting to putting it off, it does feel like an admission of “we were probably just not going to get around to it”. In my experience, the further out you plan to optimize, the more man hours you end up wasting, so I don’t see a company investing heavily in that at any point, but doing so post early launch seems wasteful if they legitimately cared about it.
Keeping it positive, nice.
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.
Apparently there are m.2 NVMe drives with DRAM caches.
I don’t know if anyone makes a pure DRAM NVMe drive — it’d forget its contents every boot — but if so, on Linux, you could make the block device a swap partition.
Exactly. Give me two slots and I don’t care if the base model comes with 64kb, that problem will be fixed before I even switch the thing on for the first time.
So it remains shit quality even if RAM gets more affordable at some reasonable point in the future.
I boycott those.
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.
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
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
I run fedora on 8GB and find it functional but definitely not comfortable. Anything past a dozen tabs and it starts getting choked up.
No OS if fine with 8GB if you use it for anything other than browsing memes
Actually, the web browser is one of the major offenders when it comes to consuming large amounts of RAM.
There’s more than that ?
In a single tab
You’re thinking of CP/M, right?
Can CP/M address >= 2^32 bytes?
https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/cpm-internals
CP/M requires a minimum of 20K RAM, although realistically, 48K is the bare minimum. Most systems have the maximum 64K.
Sounds like it can’t address > 2¹⁶ bytes.
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…
Can see that happening, in this fake economy.
Isn’t the issue here the newest generation? I keep reading they’re 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.
So our generation will be the first to have to teach both our boomer parents AND our millennial offspring what “RAM” is?!
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
GenX is mostly forgotten until tech support is needed, either direction, yes.
Millennials are fine, lol, and overlap with genx, this relates to the teens and early 20s age group.
We had two generations of competent people. It’s a idiot sandwich but the bread is the stupid part!
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.
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.
I don’t 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. You don’t need that much.
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.
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.
They do not care about the planned obsolescence of it all.
They absolutely do care. It’s a bonus for them.
Easier to justify making trash.
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 😜
Cheap homelab.
lmao of course it’s gonna be soldered in to push you to higher tiers
Probably single channel too because of course
mid-range laptops to 8GB
My not-terribly-new 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.
That too on ARM. Whereas modern applications on Windows (and Mac, Linux) even on high performance x86 sucks so much. Slack and Chrome are two of the worst pieces of software ever designed by humans.
Don’t worry Microsoft will shove as much agentic AI bullshit into Windows 11 as they can, further ruining performance.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications
Minimum system requirements for Copilot+ PCs
RAM: 16 GB DDR5/LPDDR5
I think that OpenAI has probably kind of bashed a hole in the bottom of Microsoft’s boat on the local AI stuff, if 8GB is going to be midrange.
But AI can download RAM.
/s
