There’s no place for expensive laptops with 8GB of RAM anymore
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Instead of asking software vendors to make better apps, we ask hardware vendors to put more RAM.
Instead of asking an industry that can distribute the change in months, we ask the industry that will take years to change the entirety of the installed base.
Instead of asking for higher efficiency and better use of resources we already have, we accept bloat as a natural fact of life and accommodate to that.
Instead of maximizing the use of all the resources we have already mined and the energy we have already used, the devices that are functional but slow when used with bloated software, we encourage active obscolecence and further pollution of our environment, exploitation of resources in dubious onditions, more-than-grey working conditions, all in the name of "it is possible to do more, so we should do more".
Is this really the direction we want ?
I don’t disagree with your post, but what is the solution here?
Your average consumer likely doesn’t understand the specific role of computer RAM, nor do they understand that software they’re using excessively wastes it. How can they accept or reject something they don’t know?
And it’s a similar problem with many developers. They don’t think about memory, or they view it as some infinite resource pool.
I see folks often times using complex “frameworks” to solve trivial problems. They merely wanted to 2 + 2, but that framework has a dependency graph for solving systems of equations and partial derivatives.
Democratization of tech and programming has resulted in a lot of inefficiencies. I mean - that’s the cost, right?
> we encourage active obscolecence and further pollution of our environment
I don’t think your typical consumer encourages this at all. Between their jobs, families, and all the stress of day to day life, Im not convinced they even have time to think about these things.
Like always for consumer protection, the only recourse is legal action. Ask your govt representatives to make slow software illegal. Carbon tax on inefficient code. IIRC Germany has started looking into it ?
Given that RAM size can have those ramifications energy-wise, it sounds almost like it would be a win, to go against the grain of the article and push for an upper limit of memory, say 4-8GB, if the environmental factor was the lone metric to judge on.
Secondary effects follows due to restraints, software makers who doesn't want to see users churn from their applications start scrambling to optimize codebases so the executives won't loose out on their bonuses for that fiscal year.
What if the software is completely usable when it’s slow? What if it’s slow by design? That’s not outlawed?
And what’s the metric for being slow? Latency? Latency across what dimension? Who measures it and policies this exactly? Or do we slap fines based on resource consumption? What if my software just runs slower on the JVM if I’m on Java 11 instead of Java 8? What if that problem isn’t my fault but because someone in my dependency graph has a regression? Oh they open sourced their code. Am I liable now because I have a dependency on it and upgraded to the new version?
What if it’s network conditions that are causing the slow performance. Am I liable? Is your internet provider liable? What’s the minimum bar for performance, across what dimensions, and who defines it? And where do we find people with the education, background, training to define such a vast standard? How do we ensure it’s fair? Maybe I can’t write as performant code as the well funded people at Google or Amazon. Am I just shut out of the market entirely? Or is it applied selectively based on market cap of a company?
If you provide hardware for developers who build software with a direct user interface, don't get them the best. Getting them the best for build machines, so they don't have to wait around for builds makes sense, but make sure the machines they run interactive tests and personal usage on are not the best.
When your developers have 16gb or more ram with 8 cores and a fast SSD and your users have 4 gb, a dual core 15w cpu, and a spinning disk, it can be hard to understand the sometimes huge difference in experience. And sometimes, it's actually not that much work to make things better for users with low end devices. The difference between high end phones and low end phones can be even more stark.
An anecdote that has long stuck with me from a bicycle mechanic back in the rust belt: ~“Anyone can make new stuff work well, but not many folks still have the patience and expertise to really make the older stuff shine, but it can and it does with a bit of care.”
For work, I upgraded from an 8th Gen Intel 6-Core i9 laptop with 32GB@2400mhz and a 1050ti to a 5950x / RTX 3090 / 32GB@3600mhz with tight timings and it’s very noticeably faster for general desktop usage and development.
Software development can either focus on new features made possible by complex inefficient abstractions or can be focused on efficiency in limited hardware.
Focusing on efficiency will always come at cost of reduced features.
As long as hardware is not limiting developers are going to focus on new features giving them the edge, when hardware growth slows , performance will become a factor for competition.
Customers are today paying for features, when they for performance industry will also shift.
Electron has enabled a whole host of apps to become possible despite it's obvious performance limitations. I would rather have those poor performing apps rather than just few perfomant native apps.
I personally don't think that people should ever have to buy a new computer until their use-case changes. At most, they might need a battery replacement after a few years. The idea that people need to replace a machine every six years to keep doing the same tasks is backwards.
Hardware is, and should be, limiting.
All my private computers are getting around 10 years by now.
VS, Windows 10, Netbeans, Eclipse all work just fine.
Naturally I am not using Docker to start a Python web server.
Slack is a usual target of derision around these parts, for example. I don't use Slack, but my client has me use Teams which seems just as bad, maybe worse.
I really wonder what those great features of Teams are that have a chat application lag on an 8th gen desktop i5? And I mean lag for basic UI things, like move the mouse around the list of contacts. When nothing else happens on the computer.
I remember when I was younger, at the beginning of the 2000s, I used to chat with friends on whatever IM clients we had at the time. On computers ridiculously slow by today's standards. I used to have a 1.4 GHz Athlon until the late 2000s. Single core. 256 MB RAM. The chat client would never ever lag. I guess we didn't have emojis at the time, but smileys were good enough. I'm not really sure that wasting all these resources on that is such a good investment.
There is a noticeable delay between my key press and the character showing up in Teams. Sometimes the characters don't show up in the right order (how's that even possible?! and yes, it only happens in Teams). That's just text. No 4K screen sharing of an AAA game. No live UHD camera with 32 people multiplexed in ultra quality on a 8k screen or whatever. Text. We used to have this down. What happened? What features do we have now that justify this terrible regression in UX?
My normal desktop has a 240hz monitor and going between that and 60hz is an immediately noticeable downgrade in performance. Why did we accept 60hz as good enough for so long? Even CRTs commonly ran at faster refresh rates. IIRC 1600x1200@90 was what I ran back in the Pentium 3 days on a 21” Sony CRT. We still don’t have useable 4:4:4 4k@120hz on something like a 32-42” screen available.
Anyway, I agree that web tech is easy to develop (not that I thought Visual Basic was terribly difficult comparatively) but there are too many layers of abstraction these days. Can we not make sufficiently advanced compilers to make these really efficient? If not, do we need to go back to tinge drawing board with libuv and event loops? Maybe interrupts and manual memory management really were better. Java for GUI apps certainly hasn’t done much to show that it’s a better solution.
It’s funny but sad how these days, apt upgrade runs so fast, and compiling kernel modules happens extremely quickly, but it takes 10x as long as it did 20 years ago to schedule a calendar appointment with someone because GCal in a browser is so slow. Slack compared to curses-based IRC clients…woof.
I have a 60 Hz display, and an IPS one at that, which doesn't even try to pretend it's fast. Still, my terminal window doesn't lag behind when I type. Teams does, every time.
> Java for GUI apps certainly hasn’t done much to show that it’s a better solution.
Meh, I use a Jetbrains IDE almost everyday, sometimes even with Rust and pretty much everything turned on. Even on my almost eight-year-old MBP input never, ever lags like Teams does on a 6 core i7 with a "gaming" GPU. It's not as smooth as a Linux terminal, but it's never irritating.
> It’s funny but sad how these days, apt upgrade runs so fast, and compiling kernel modules happens extremely quickly, but it takes 10x as long as it did 20 years ago to schedule a calendar appointment with someone because GCal in a browser is so slow. Slack compared to curses-based IRC clients…woof.
Exactly. And what drives me up a wall is seeing people being resigned. Some act like they don't even notice this. I guess we may moan until we're blue in the face on HN &c, but if "regular people" don't care, no one's going to do anything about this.
A lot of non technically focus look at keyboard while typing, they won't even notice the lag if they are not looking at the screen.
If there is enough customer demand/push latency is not that difficult to solve even on electron, browsers that they based on don't have this latency problem after all.
The market economics dictate features, well built apps are not what is necessarily selling.
The reason teams and slack are so much slower than the chat products of old is because they are not the same product category at all. It's like comparing microsoft word to notepad++. Yes, word is clearly an inferior way to quickly edit a plain text file, but obviously anyone complaining about that is missing the point of word.
A fair question to ask is whether we should have platforms like slack and teams. Why are we rebuilding a tiling OS inside of a webpage, and then wrapping that webpage in an electron container, and then complaining that it gobbles up RAM like crazy?
I agree with you. I think this is exactly the issue.
I get that Teams and the chat apps of old are not the same category, but I think it's a fair question to ask whether this new category is relevant. MS Outlook already had a calendar which, somehow, loaded much quicker than the one in Teams. Even the calendar in Outlook web loads so much quicker than Teams it's not even funny.
I also understand that there are much more functions in Teams (which people may or may not use), but those are all supported by the backend servers at Microsoft, they don't run locally. Teams is basically a web-browser. So I'm not sure that this functionality is an excuse for what are local UI issues.
When I type in the message box, I input text. Maybe some rich text or something, but still, nothing that Word 97 couldn't have handled while being blazing fast on a 486 (aside maybe from emojis, but they can't possibly be the reason why everything is so slow). The same can be said about the lagging animations in the contact list. These all happen locally, with nothing to ask from a complex web service or having to implement some complex function.
This is probably sort of true, but it's way worse than it has to be. I feel like with just a little more effort, a little bit of a higher standard, we could get massive improvements.
Electron is great for the problem that it solved. But what if they'd started from day 1 thinking about performance? Maybe they would have taken a year longer, or whatever, but I'd imagine it could be 10x-100x faster/lighter. Perhaps not, but there's plenty of software where that is the case.
The problem then is that someone would release a garbage slow version sooner, and we'd all be using that - and imo this is the more serious issue. When something like electron comes out we need to push back wayyyy harder, the industry needs actual standards.
Things like maximum viable latency for UX - it is insane to me that software deployed on extremely powerful systems can have 10s of milliseconds spent on something like typing a character, or even longer! But we have no quality standards in this industry, so it's I guess hard for everyone to say "this is below our standard".
There are some excellent app developers out there that I don’t mind forking $20 bucks over for a “simple” piece of software such a duplicate file finder on Mac OS X, but with many software offered for free there’s a problem of the tragedy of the commons ( Electron apps are a prime example )
One thing I don't understand: Microsoft does have the knowledge to make a lean Electron app. Look at VS Code... But somehow they don't bother applying their lessons learned to Teams :?
Electron can be lean, but it must be difficult somehow otherwise every app would do it.
They're essentially the same app; the desktop version uses Electron. There are a few desktop-only features but the desktop application is mostly powered by inefficient web technologies.
That's where we, as developers, have something to do. If we disagree, we have to voice it to make it more visible in the public discourse. The high-end configurations are built for us developers first, so we as customers have this leverage.
To these students, I recommend simple text editors such as notepad++. But nowadays with Zoom and Teams consuming all available resources even on more powerful laptops, I feel all hope is lost.
Although often it helps to use the web versions of, say, Goto Meeting or Outlook, instead of the app version. Tragic as that is.
It's just desktop development might as well be legacy development, and the vast majority of people only use their web browser and a few office apps at most. Except games & command line apps, which are also developed in an efficient way, how many apps do you have on your desktop device. Probably barely any compared to your mobile device!
What is being optimized is developer time, productivity and time to market, because if you haven't noticed in the last 15 years, developers have gotten very, very expensive. Inefficent software is purely a business decision. Make something faster than web dev that gets delivered over browsers (flutter is a good candidate) and watch as all new apps all of a sudden become that.
162 of the lex podcast with Jim Keller (a hardware god) dives into this well.
What a world we live in....
A burger with beef will cost roughly the same as a vegetarian burger. Even if nothing can replace beef, one should question whether there is a need for beef and if it could be replaced, because the alternative emits less CO2. Same goes for RAM.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
There are other silly examples too, like this $1400 XPS 13 that has non-configurable 8 GB of RAM together with latest gen i7:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...
I would agree that this skimping on RAM is pretty ridiculous. I can understand if some <$500 laptops still would ship with 8 GB, nobody should expect any greatness from those, but for devices costing three times more the expectations are higher.
Heck, my main PC is i5 (so mid-range) from 2015 and even it has 16 GB of RAM.
Or maybe they're being smart by adding RAM themselves rather than paying dell an overpriced markup?
2. the markup is often warranted. There's a vast difference between "business" laptops and "consumer" laptops. I can't speak for dell's precision line, but lenovo's thinkpads are leagues better (build quality, support, etc) than the consumer crap you get at best buy.
Razer is one kinda-exception that I can think of, where they have fairly solid laptops that can be more minimal, but the build quality is still not quite up to mobile workstation standards.
TL;DR I wish I could get a MBP with TOTL hardware instead of having even the highest-end config still shoot for thin-and-light.
But on the other hand, they are clearly thought more as "hybrids" than other gamer laptops: - The UEFI lets you decide if you want to enable/disable the intel chipset (Useful when you want to be sure everything goes to the GPU/want to use things that don't work well with NVidia's Optimus) - Lightweight and easy to put in a bag. Not one of those 5 inches thick laptops that weight 5 kilograms - The look is made not to scream "gamer laptop !". - Wide configuration range for a single chassis.
Also not that expensive, even for consumer-grade standard. Got one with i7-9750h/RTX2060/16GB/512GB NVMe for 1100€/1350$ one year ago.
All mobile workstations, regardless of vendor, are overpriced in comparison with gaming laptops, because those who buy mobile workstations are forced to buy them for a few features that are missing in gaming laptops.
As another poster has already written, a common strategy when buying a Dell Precision mobile workstation is to buy them with the minimum RAM of 4 GB and with the minimum SSD of 128 GB, with the intention to dump the original RAM and SSD and buy something like 64 GB of ECC RAM and a fast 2 TB SSD, at much lower prices than from Dell.
The only reason for the 4 GB RAM configuration is because Dell will not sell a laptop without RAM or without a SSD or HDD.
The economy from buying yourself the RAM can easily be up to one thousand USD or even more, even after paying for the mandatory 4 GB.
To be honest, considering we're talking about Dell, I must say I'm nearly surprised they did not put a DRM in the BIOS/UEFI to forbid using more than the quantity the laptop shipped from without paying a license. I assume it's that then, all the customers that do buy the cheap lines and update the RAM themselves would go to other shops ?
If you’re cost sensitive, you upgrade yourself.
If you’re paying an overworked IT department to buy laptops, you pay the premium to Dell instead of hiring an employee to deal with upgrades like this, and then hire another person to scream at multiple people (instead of one) when all the laptops start BSODing because of some Microsoft update combined with Murphy’s Law.
My Acer aspire from 2015 or so cost me $450. It came with 8GB of RAM the RAM is also upgradeable. I could swap them out for 16GB. Unfortunately the video card in it is trash.
All enabled by the ever more RAM hungry bloatware that gets pushed to users' computers unless they're painfully selective about the software they install.
It's probably also just marketing ... having some ridiculous 4 GB equipped laptop in the store that's only few hundred bucks cheaper than the 8 GB model, makes it way easier for many people to buy the latter. Even if both are stupidly over priced.
I greatly dislike Electron, but since almost everyone is forcing that on us, I, as a protestor, got top-of the line hardware.
I got 128 Gb of RAM, i9-9880H, SSD NVME2, and a Quadro RTX 4000 8Gb, on a mobile workstation.
Let's see how much time left until Electron apps catch up in bloat.
My problem has always been smart phones because I refuse to drop $500+ dollars every 2 years as apps get hungrier
But given that quadro, I feel like this wasn't at all a protest, but rather you do some sort of resource heavy work such as 3d simulations or rendering. Yes, these pursuits have always been resource intensive. No, it's not the fault of electron.
Nope, I don't do anything specialized, other than running some virtual machines while debugging and CI/CD pipelines. I've never exceeded 24 Gb of RAM in usage. At some point, I would like to run an small cloud infraestructure on this thing.
I have two web browsers, VS code (remote mode only), and slack open. About 4GB is being used by corporate crapware. I use Firefox as a json viewer, so it’s using 0.5GB. Emacs is using 50MB and my imap client is using 260MB
Various UIs frequently hang waiting for swap. 32 GB is not enough, even though I’m using it like a dumb terminal.
I could say to be in the minority, but apparently SPAs kind of rediscovered SSR is a thing.
It's mind blowing that trivial tasks like editing a google sheet document have come to consume even remotely comparable resources. Google sheets as it existed 8 years ago was snappier and more responsive while using far less memory.
There seems to be more competition among games than "productivity" software when it comes to performance. It begs the question of how bad things will continue to become before it starts affecting the bottom line.
Discord and Slack: no excuses. These are chat apps running in the background. There could be a client taking just kilobytes it there was a will for it.
Machines should be upgradable/repairable, I think the right to repair also means that the end user should be able to decide how much memory a machine has (within bounds of course).
How will this work? I don't know. There are at least two instances where I didn't buy a new laptop because the memory system was either hobbled, topped out too soon or was not fully upgradable.
I think it is a larger driver of ewaste than people realize and it prevents older machines from being repurposed as easily.
Even with soldered ram, it isn't out of the question to get the machine sent off and have the memory upgraded, it just requires the right tooling.
That's a big if. Apple seems to be hitting homerun after another with their unfixable hardware.
Soldering RAM down right next to the CPU or on top of it (as is done in SoC style laptops) lets you use narrower, faster buses at lower voltage swing and lower power (LPDDR4X operates at half the I/O voltage of DDR4).
Now soldered down SSDs, yeah, unless you're building a thin phone with no space for a connector, there's no excuse for that. PCIe works perfectly fine across a connector.
I had a Lenovo Stinkpad Carbon X1. The soldered-in RAM started to fail, causing memory corruption. That machine is now a brick, and I am still pissed off about it.
Modular RAM is fixable RAM.
That said, I had to put a new battery in a 17" gaming laptop a while back. It's a huge machine and there was zero excuse for the battery not be easily swappable.
Memory buses consume very little power compared to the rest of the components. Even memory itself doesn’t consume much, except VRAM in high-end GPUs but that’s an order of magnitude faster than system RAM in most computers.
Battery impact of soldered versus socketed RAM is negligible. For instance, HP ProBook 445 G7 and G8 have two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, yet the battery life is up to 14 hours.
Computers with soldered RAM are slightly cheaper to manufacture (less parts). Also, it’s not user-upgradeable, users are likely to replace the complete computer after a few years. Memory and disk requirements of software grows quickly over time: https://techtalk.pcmatic.com/research-charts-memory/ These two factors create incentives for computer manufacturers to solder the RAM, despite that’s not in the interests of users, and the environment.
Allow the soldered on ram to be upgradable, or put vacant spots for more ram to be added later.
Allow HBMs to be stacked, or sell a machine with the HBM not attached and I can source one myself.
There absolutely could be a socketed standard for memory.
But in general I am arguing for a more upgradable philosophy and manufacturers should be obligated to adhere to that philosophy. The technicals will always be changing, it isn't really a technical problem at all.
Anyway, if you want, nothing (except economics) is stopping you from upgrading your soldered DRAM.
It inspired one of the makers of the first Personal Computer.
My work is cheaping out on laptops and also the vendor they buy MacBooks from only wants to do off the shelf SKUs and not CTO (Configure To Order). So due to Apple's crazy low base RAM I have a MacBook Pro 2019 with 8GB RAM.
Literally every day I get this panicy popup saying I MUST close something or the system will reboot. Often I get random crashes. The "Memory Pressure" in activity monitor is almost always red.
I don't know how Apple can advocate selling a "Pro" system with only 8GB RAM while making the mandatory upgrade to 16 really expensive and difficult (much longer leadtime on CTO models).
I've taken to using the web version a lot but it's not ideal. Another big memory hog is Firefox. I don't use Safari because macOS isn't the only platform I use.
But you buy a computer for more than just today.
I think Discord, Skype, Telegram and co are made with electron thus the memory issues. Great for iterating, horrible for cheap laptops.
The article itself isn't really interesting though, because not really technical as to what the issue is exactly.
https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift/
https://github.com/UnigramDev/Unigram
I’m a huge fan of Telegram’s model of releasing a cross-platform core for the community to build their own clients on top of. I wish all chat apps followed its lead.
Go back to the days where you could have 1 client and connect to ICQ, AIM, GChat, etc etc etc all in 1 program
People should not need to have Skype, Teams, Telgram, Discord and Slack all running on their computers at the same time
If your a journalist tapping out a column and only using one application at a time yes 8gb will work for you.
Maybe I’ll regret it in a few years if the ssd dies due to the extra load though… I do really wish the storage was easier to change
Even relatively modest compression ratios add up in aggregate. Swapping compressed pages is also more efficient (when it happens) because less data needs to be persisted to the disk.
That's not to say 8GB is enough for everyone but it punches a bit above its weight in a lot of use cases.
If non-technical friends and family ask for computer recommendation I just tell them to get the cheapest Mac. If they want a PC I noticed that they’re normally not to happy about the price if laptops I’ll recommend. You’ll still find Windows laptops with 4GB of RAM (and a terrible screen). The main selling point is the price, $1000 or less (note that’s Danish prices including 25% VAT).
The only worthwile metric is how fast stuff actually runs/noticable wait times on swapping, etc
The OS uses the ram as this makes running tasks faster. No point in keeping it free.
Only when looking at a system as a whole. Individual applications should still use as little RAM as possible; some people run more than just slack.
this meme[1] needs to die. windows, mac, and linux (htop) all correctly differentiate between "used but used for cache" RAM and "used for application" RAM. When people are talking about not having enough free ram, they're talking about chrome, spotify, and slack taking up 2GB each, not the output of "free" showing only 8MB free.
Is it possible that the problem is worse on Windows because of the DLL zoo, with each app shipping its own, whereas the Mac makes heavier use of shared Frameworks?
Some wrote on their blog, sorry don’t remember who, if Electron apps (which I assume the Telegram client is) uses to many resources, then don’t argue that it should be a native application, instead ask if we can make Electron more efficient. That’s a smart idea.
I also use Windows (desktop gaming machine), and the main problem with it is the amount of crapware that Microsoft is starting to bundle. It was once the claim that Windows had a bad name because of all the junk that OEMs pre-installed. Well, Microsoft themselves are doing it now.
In my daily work with many web apps, 8GB is certainly not enough.
But as long as I don't run Photoshop or Premiere, 32GB isn't needed either.
Usually my memory usage is around 10-12GB.
At least we can agree that 8 isn't enough :D
I'm getting the heebie-jeebies when I have too many open.
Then I realized that since I have the ability to spin up any imaginable resources I need at the click of a button - or by writing a shit ton of yaml - without having to worry about the company getting a large bill from our cloud provider like I did before, I don’t need to run everything locally. I can just open my own AWS account.
That being said, I was shocked I only occasionally experience slowness with VSCode, Slack, Outlook, and Chrome running. Occasionally I will have to use PowerPoint or Word. On the rare occasions that I do need a beefier Linux or Windows environment, I use Cloud9 or WorkSpaces.
At home with a 1GB up/down connection it isn’t too bad. I don’t know how inconvenient this will be if we ever start traveling. I was hired post Covid.
[1] While I spend most of my time developing, I’m officially a consultant in ProServe. I would hope that the SDEs get something beefier.
Otherwise, I mostly run dev related stuff on remote IDEs.
AWS Cloud9 and Google Docs is probably where 99% of my work happens.
Apple M1-based laptops are fine with 8 GB; it's an, errm, Apples to oranges comparison.
And just outlook teams and slack does have quite an over head.
The three outliers are MsMpEng (windows defender AV), SearchIndexer, and Explorer. The last one makes sense given how much stuff it's tracking (all my open windows, my open folder views, tray icons, etc) though I feel like it should definitely be lighter.
SearchIndexer and MsMpEng use a ton of RAM and I don't know why, that feels inexcusable. Maybe it's mostly cache pages that are reported wrong and will be evicted if memory is low?
Out of all of those, though, they predate win10 by a while. The same stuff would've been running on 7. So I'm not sure that things have gotten worse - I suspect it's all about the third-party software installed on the machine, and people have tons of third-party software installed now.
(And if you need to, you can disable Defender and SearchIndexer. Maybe you should.)
In the end most of my memory is going to third-party software (Firefox, qBitTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, LINE - all 400mb or more) or optional services I have turned on (Windows Update's "delivery optimization" will sometimes chew up a bunch of RAM if you have updates waiting to install - it seems to be caching them in memory to distribute them to other machines on your network. I wouldn't be surprised if this will get thrown out in limited memory scenarios, but make sure it's turned off!)
Every Electron app you have open is probably 400+mb on Windows at best, and often worse. (Electron on mac uses different APIs, which may help?)
Maybe the reason all these new M1 laptops feel great with 8gb of RAM is that mac users don't need to install as much third-party software, and Electron apps use less memory on OS X? I don't think most macs have a virus scanner installed, for example.
Author has a severe misunderstanding about how RAM is "used" actually allocated. The exact same system he has but with 8GB RAM would probably be at 70-80% ram usage or so. The reason why he reaches 8GB+ on his machines so fast is because he has 16GB. Nothing is more useless than empty RAM (in a PC at least). The OS does and should use as much ram as possible if there is plenty RAM left. The system is fast if the RAM is used not if it is free.
My 32GB desktop has rarely used more than 8GB of RAM under any of my workloads.
Running ArchLinux x86_64 with kernel 5.12, 2 firefox instances, qemu w/ Debian x86_64, multiple xterms w/ vim, ncmpcpp, mpd, sshd:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 32031 1552 26992 204 3485 29816
Swap: 0 0 0
At home, I may have a 96 core EPYC with 512 GiB of Reg'd ECC RAM, but it doesn't have the locality or reachability of something that's with you. Network presence and low-latency aren't a given.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipkill
Edit: Resources:
https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory
https://tedium.co/2021/01/06/error-correcting-code-memory-hi...
[PDF] https://defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Schu...
DEFCON 19: Bit-squatting: DNS Hijacking Without Exploitation (trivia: at the time of filming, I was excessively-hungover and laying across 6 seats in the middle of an empty area to the extreme right, from the podium's perspective. I did watch the presentation with sunglasses on indoors because my eyes weren't cooperating nicely with photons.)
Edit follow-on:
And I don't want to lug-around a 17" Russian tank laptop that needs wheeled tracks to move. 13-15" max.
Oh, and my main development VM has 8GB of RAM; I can give it more, but I never used more than 5 or 6.
Expensive laptops is a very relative term and judging the value of an expensive laptop on the amount of RAM is dodgy; I expect build quality, great lifetime (my wife's Surface Pro 3 has 6-7 years of flawless operation), low weight, good screen - I don't have RAM in that list. Yes, if you need more RAM you buy a model with more RAM, but if you don't need it then you don't buy it, it is that simple for me - I agree others may see it differently.
They talk about technical things incorrectly, and I'm sure they'd say, "Well, we just want to appeal to regular people" instead of admitting they're not trying.
Their statement that that laptop makers will get more of a discount buying in bulk isn't false, but it's not really the issue. If laptop base models came with 16 gigs, the associated memory markup will still be there, yet they suggest otherwise as if the market somehow would rather help people than make money.
As far as the article goes, they discuss the symptoms of the larger problem, but not the problem itself - our apps, particularly browsers, use too much memory, and nobody is talking about ways to punish app makers and web sites that abuse this.
If you are a developer you absolutely do not need 128GB of RAM to run SQL Server! But if it convinces your management to buy you top spec kit, fair play to you.
Agree with you there, while a 1T database is possible on a laptop I wouldn’t want to use it for real work!
while in past 2GB RAM after launch of Windows seemed fixed regardless of how much RAM you have, nowadays, Windows will just take large portion of RAM regardless of whether you have 4, 8, 16 or 32, it's not fixed number and it's not required number
for instance I am running Windows 10 on laptop with 8GB RAM and I have currently available 3GB RAM with Edge and other app I use for work consuming combined 1.5-2GB RAM, so by author's logic Windows takes less than 3GB in total
Look at the performance per dollar on CPU, even with slower improvement rate on node and IPC, the compound performance added up over time if still significant.
For DRAM, especially when we moved to LPDDR, the price floor of dollar per GB hasn't moved at all over the past 10 years. This is a challenge when vendors' profit margin are constantly being squeezed.
> It’s unacceptable to charge $1,000 or more for a laptop with only 8GB of RAM now.
Consider Apple has their entry level laptop at $999. And most chrome book at below $400 are absolutely junk. I would rate $999 as high medium tier.
> Laptop makers buying RAM in bulk will always get it at a lower price than you or I would by going to Amazon.
This is not true if you bump the RAM amount in every machine you sell and end up using the world's supply of cheap RAM up. Build to order doesn't have that risk since most people won't do it.
The instance shuts itself off using a cloudwatch alarm after 5 minutes of idle time. My IDE is vscode using remote connections, and a ssh client. Startup time is less than 20 seconds and I scripted that too.
Cost: about $0.15 for a few hours of work. Less vscode, it will work from any hardware built withing the last 10-15 years that has a ssh client.
Edit: that has a ssh client (not just a Linux terminal)
The hard drive size price issue is basically the same for the Surface Book 3, several years later. I like the design of the laptop but I won't be getting another one.
But the specs fall short. Macbook Pro hard drives start at 512GB and go up to 8TB, and they have more ram at the high end as well. It's just annoying and I'm probably just going to try to build my own laptop in a year or two.
For my daily use (programming hobby projects, studying, browsing) a 10-year old Thinkpad T520 with i7 is more than adequate after upgrading it with SSD and 16GB of RAM, especially when using Linux instead of Windows.
I think Chinese manufacturers have realised they will never be "cool" enough to have insane profit margins.
But today's 8 soldered is tomorrow underpowered landfill fodder. It's irresponsible to intentionally manufacture technology that's that disposable.
Just because Windows task manager says 10 GB RAM are used doesn’t mean it could easily do with half of it, just foregoing a bit of preloading of apps/files that you might perhaps be using.
Since we cannot inflict the pain on the ones that have the most tools to do something about it, end users end up paying for the inefficiency.
But yeah, a browser is almost like a second OS running on the machine. Only it's built at a higher level (abstraction-wise) with much less focus on optimizing resource usage compared to a proper OS.
I can't use an 8gb laptop because 1 vm or too many open browser tabs along with an app or two based in electron and after some time the thrashing commences.
My daughter is perfectly happy with the 8gb laptop I gave here. Kind of wish I could put half of that in my laptop. <g>