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Comment by ascendantlogic | Hacker News Reader

Only 16 gigs of RAM? Why do companies still hold that limit in 2018? I was hoping for 32 gigs back in 2015.

Expected the new XPS to have a developer flavor soon, but also expected it to be limited to 16GB still. Was not surprised since the Windows version has the same limit.

Went ahead and purchased a 32GB System76 Galaga Pro last week with the same i7-8550U available on the XPS. It's a slightly larger 13", but feels a lot closer to my 5th gen XPS 13 than the MacBook Pro the Galaga replaces. Comes with a retina-like matte IPS 3200x1800 screen that is a joy to use. No touch, for better or worse. Keyboard layout is actually superior to the XPS for development with dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn buttons. Pop!OS is nice and worth a spin, plus it has XPS levels of support under Ubuntu 16.04 which is available pre-loaded. Camera is in a much more useful place than on the XPS. It's also cheaper at most configurations.

Downsides are a smaller battery (probably to make room for both an M.2 SSD and a 7mm 2.5" drive bay) and a touchpad that while multitouch and decent isn't as good as the XPS touchpad. Also, while the screen hinge feels more solid than the XPS's, it doesn't go back as far as I would expect. XPS uses better materials in spots, like soft touch carbon fiber in palm.

So far I'm extremely happy with the Galaga Pro and would recommend to anyone who wants a small powerful laptop like the XPS 13, but is turned off by its 16GB limitation.

You could go precision though. Which is what I did. Precision 5520 has an Ubuntu option and works flawlessly with Linux. 32-64g of DDR4 and 12h of battery with the 9cell upgrade

I should know. I’ve been using one for nearly a year.

The Precision is a great option if you're looking for a 15" laptop.

What's the added weight of default 3 cell to 9 cell battery? Last I checked you could only upgrade to 6 cell.

Holding out for next generation of Intel (or, now, AMD) CPUs before picking up another Precision. Great, beastly powerful machines, have been running Fedora since 2010 on Precision line.

I also recently bought a Galago Pro, primarily since it was the only reasonably priced laptop I could find with 32GB ram. I'd say overall I'm happy but it's a mixed bag.

Pros: - Gorgeous screen, lightweight, Ubuntu 16 feels snappy. - System76 customer service is amazing. - Sub $2000 machine with 32GB RAM and i7. (Mine was $1850 after shipping & tax.) - Lots of ports! The fold-out ethernet port is especially nice, for those rare times when you need one.

Cons: - I dislike the keyboard layout quite a lot, but I'm hoping I get used to it. The right-hand column of home/end/etc gets hit quite a lot by accident when I'm trying to hit enter, tab, etc. Also, the center of my space bar has a dead spot unless pressed very hard. - Battery life is bad. If you're just browsing, you get maybe 4 hours. Anything intensive will run the battery down in under an hour. I mostly use it at home so this isn't a big problem for me. - As stated above, the touch pad feels unresponsive, esp. if you're used to a macbook pro. Not sure whether this is a hardware or software issue. - They charge you $77 (after shipping & tax) for a second charger. (It also seems to be a nonstandard size, so good luck finding one from an OEM.)

Intel needs to ship Cannon Lake before they'll have support for LPDDR4. That was expected to ship in 2016 but is now sometime in the first half of 2018.

If you want 32GB on current Intel mobile chips, you have to use DDR4 rather LPDDR3, thus requiring more power. Some laptops do this, but usually not the ultrabook-ish ones. Upcoming Intel chips will support LPDDR4, removing the problem.

Well I honestly didn't know that. Thank you for the information.

And then RAM prices shot way up. That may have something to do with it. I'm holding off on a new home virtualization server build for now, hoping that RAM prices come back down.

Intel chips don't support LPDDR4

the XPS 15 is available with 32gb

The XPS 15 doesn't appear to use low-power DDR4 memory - it's valid to trade battery life for performance but most users buy the former.

> Why do companies still hold that limit in 2018?

Because laptops don't need server levels of RAM. What are you doing that needs that much RAM that couldn't better be done on a remote desktop/server than on a developer laptop?

Not 100% sure but mostly due to battery life, the more ram you have, the more power you use. 32 gigs probably shaves hour or so off the battery (don't know for sure) and that might be the reason.

I'd think that the people who are buying a 32GB variant are probably the people who have their laptop plugged in when utilizing an excess amount of memory.

If that is the case there are a lot of options that are not ultra portable

Being ultra-portable makes it less of a chore to lug a high spec machine between the places it get's plugged in at for heavy work, and still allows lighter use on the go.

I use my laptop almost always with a power supply (either home or office) so I would happily trade some battery life for more RAM.

Then a 13" ultrabook is probably not the right thing for you; search for "mobile workstation" on any of the major manufacturers sites and you'll find ones that can be configured up to 64GB of ram.

I like 13" laptops. They are easy to carry around and I can hook up an external screen.

MSI is the only company I know of with 32GB in a 13" laptop. No clue if they boot linux.

And that only with the QHD option. Why??

> Why do companies still hold that limit in 2018?

The reason is Intel. Intel chipsets don’t support >16gb of ram with the LP variants of DIMMS virtually all laptop makers use.

My work computers are all on 8 GB...

A lot of these newer NVMe SSD's these days have such insane I/O that swaps are significantly faster. That said RAM is still preferable (especially when working with multiple VMs)

last I have checked RAM was power hungry.

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