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Comment by pabs3 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the RAM quantity on laptops hasn't really increased much over time, anyone know if that is true and what is driving it?

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I recently bought a new laptop for my son. One of my main concerns was upgradeability, so I had to discard a lot of models with soldered-on RAM.

It really struck me how many laptops are still coming out with 4GB of RAM, which is simply not enough nowadays. Also, many vendors hide or make it difficult to know how much RAM you can add.

Laptop makers are making sure people are locked in with less RAM so that they’ll buy another laptop soon.

Both my last laptops were made obsolete only by less RAM.

I very much doubt this is the reason. Soldered on ram lowers the cost of the device, makes it thinner, and improves the reliability. At the cost of upgradability. Since the average user never upgraded the ram when they had the ability to, its purely a win for most users.

It also allows the manufacturer to charge users who want more RAM higher prices. They often charge much more than the street price of DIMMs.

same here...

Or one can look at the anemic and declining profit figures for laptop makers (other than Apple) and come to the conclusion that they are desperately trying to compete by trying to meet their customer’s price points.

Yep true, although it's not just laptops. I often see 'high end editing PCs' with 16GB of RAM, which is possibly sufficient for 1080p editing, but nowhere near enough for 4K editing for multiple programs open.

I guess it's similar to how some laptops/budget desktops still have hard drives, even though an SSD wouldn't cost much more but it'd offer great performance benefits.

Because contrary to popular belief, RAM prices haven't really declined in the last decade [1]

1. https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.107.55/ff6.d53.myftpuploa...

Very few people need any more. There's also chip shortages of various durations.

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