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Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

Possibly a dumb question but why has RAM plateaued in high-end laptops? Very expensive laptops these days seem to have either 8 or 16GB of memory, and it seems to me as though this has been the case for about 8 years. Is there some reason that you don't see a benefit beyond that? Is it to do with using SSDs?

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What would you use more ram for?

Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill.

And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) then why do it on a laptop in a first place?

> Unless you do heavy processing over 8 seems like over kill.

I'm not doing heavy processing at the moment, and 8 seems too small for my light reading.

I have a 16 GiB MacBook and at the moment the built-in Activity Monitor say it's using ~14.5 GiB.

Firefox shows as ~9 GiB, and Safari as ~4 GiB.

I also have a VM running Linux, most of my work (other than reading and editing files) runs inside it. It's currently showing as using less than the browsers, about ~4 GiB.

There are some other tools running, such as terminals and Emacs. But they take much less.

None of this is heavy processing.

Those figures don't add up to < 16 GiB. There is obviously some sharing taking place and/or compression, or other misleading aspect to the figures. So is it using a lot of RAM really? Yes: recently I noticed serious slowdowns while reading. It's because the system was swapping to SSD under high memory pressure when I had Word, LibreOffice, Preview (for PDFs) open as well, and after some video conferencing tool was still active but not doing anything. It was not a busy CPU, it was memory pressure.

So my next laptop might need more than 16 GiB.

> And if you do heavy processing (rendering, photoshop or audio) then why do it on a laptop in a first place?

Because it's your main and only decent computer, and you need it to be portable sometimes.

Admittedly all this working from home is changing the equation temporarily. But even at home, I don't want to sit in the same place all day every day.

Back before Covid, I didn't work at a fixed location so needed to take my work with me. In future, I hope to do that again, so getting another laptop when I'm ready seems like the smart choice again.

I'm a fullstack dev, and I routinely fill up the 16GB in my laptop. I generally have two full IDEs, SSMS, Illustrator, Outlook, OneNote, Excel, Visio, a bunch of browser tabs, and now Teams or Zoom. I tend to be more constrained by core count than RAM though.

I try to use my desktop as much as possible (which has 64GB and 16 cores), but I can't always be tethered to my office.

8GB RAM is minimum for Win10 basic computer. It works for some use cases but I need more future-proof spec for such expensive device.

I put the blame squarely on the consumer. It's partly the reason why these screens rarely hit above 400nits of brightness. Market forces simply don't drive manufacturers to make 16GB the base because consumers continue to settle for the 8GB models available.

For general browsing, light workloads and watching videos, it's enough for most people.

I do programming and gaming on 8GB and don't see that becoming a problem anytime soon.

While there are workflows and software requiring a lot of resources (my work PC has 64GB and frequently uses more than half of that), most "common" uses do not.

> It's partly the reason why these screens rarely hit above 400nits of brightness

Can you give a use case for brighter displays? I usually keep my Macbooks at 3-5 bars of brightness. The only time I turn them up higher than half is when I'm in direct sunlight.

I believe it's the Intel chipset constraints

Model differentiation.

Enough where they can use the 8gb to grab the cheaper market and then upcharge bigly for the 16gb model.

There are plenty of nice 32GB laptops out there on the market. I was issued one for work as early as 2017.

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