This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Why not just tell me to go fuck myself and skip the unsatisfying foreplay?
Do it. I know which OS will run fine on 8G of RAM and which one won't.
Linux adoption.. accelerates
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.
It's neat that AI is already ruining the world in really tangible ways.
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 few documents than it takes to render a AAA game. Or at least stop benchmarking a browser with 1 page open and saying look, 1 page only takes a gig of ram and most users, at least in our imagination, only have 1 page open.
Jk
It's the web as it exists now. It can't be fixed gradually, or at least that's harder than to design from scratch a replacement with same abilities, but fewer levels of abstraction, less bloat, making a client application in reasonable time being possible. Probably with architecture and semantics centered around how social networks and messengers work, not just hypertext. Visiting a webpage and reading a group chat are different ideas, the latter doesn't imply connecting to one specific location. Again, that's something that was understood since Usenet. Just no public system like Usenet, but not morally obsolete, emerged to be popular.
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...)
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!"
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."
Time to switch to Linux people lol. Windows is barely usable on 8GB these days.
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…
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 😁
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.
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.
Welp, glad the old laptop physically broke last night and I bought a new one with 16gb on Xmas sale today.
Also glad I built a new PC last year. Not gonna be upgrading anything for the foreseeable future the way things are looking.
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.
