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Mozilla publishes hardware stats from Firefox desktop users: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

<4GB devices are ~10.6% of the mix. 4GB are 20.8%.

Is is also interesting that 68% of devices have a GPU from Intel, i.e. no proper GPU.

most pre-built home PCs, office machines, virtuals, etc.

I mean, unless you're a gamer or do certain niche work... why would you need a "proper GPU?"

Those have been good enough for a while now. My late 2013 MBP worked fine until last year, when I stopped using it for unrelated reasons. It had an iris something, and IIRC that CPU wasn't even brand new when that mac model came out.

Sure, I didn't play games on it. But for regular "office use" I never had any performance issue.

For my current laptop, I specifically wanted a model without a dedicated GPU. Didn't want the hassle of dealing with that (I run Linux) and also there was no reason for me to pay extra for something I don't need. It was cheaper for me to buy a dedicated GPU for my desktop.

You check laptop offerings in one of the most wealthy countries on earth - and given that you still found devices with 4GB of ram is concerning for me. I feel like better support for 2gb devices could be life-changing for many people around the world.

While OP might not be right with 2GB, try to open a couple of browser tabs, or even worse a couple of Electron apps on a 4GB system.

Many people still buy those absolute bottom end of devices.

Even worse, some of them have soldered RAM, especially ones that are in $150-$200 range. Although expensive laptops also have RAM soldered.

Piggybacking off this

Why does my Macbook Air which cost me A$1,499(!) have soldered, unupgradable RAM?

I can SMD solder but it's still far too risky just to save a few hundred dollars

Because then you would be able to buy RAM several times cheaper than the one Apple wants to sell to you.

Not since the move to M1 SoCs where the RAM is soldered close to the CPU to minimize latency. Replaceable DIMMS are a technical no-go for such scenario.

Then the board with CPU, GPU and RAM could be made replaceable.

'Could' is the key word here.

Of course they could just deaig and sell new motherboards with new chips for the older laptops chassis, like framework does, but knowing Apple, such user upgrades will not happen.

But aren't the CPU, GPU and RAM the most expensive components on a MB, by far? I wouldn't expect such a board to be significantly less expensive than a complete one.

I don't think so. I tried to look up the price of CPU in my laptop, but it is not sold separately (it is soldered on the motherboard). The desktop version of the same CPU, which has 50% higher score in Passmark benchmark, costs 25% of the price of laptop. RAM costs approximately 10% of the price. So RAM + CPU make only 35% of total price.

Sure, but a desktop computer with 50% higher scores than a laptop with "laptop version of cpu" will cost less than the laptop (even counting a monitor), so I'm not sure that comparison holds.

For example, an HP Elitedesk 800 mini (very small, so using SO-DIMMs and integrated everything - basically a non-portable laptop) will run you around 800 Euros, while the "equivalent" Elitebook 830/840 will run you 1500 euros. Specs are "similar", same generation mid-level i5, same RAM, same SSD. Main difference is the Elitedesk will have desktop-class CPU. Throw in a cheap HP screen (200 euro - Elitebook laptops have ridiculously bad screens, so that's fair), and you get to 2/3 the price of the laptop.

In modern DDR5 settings the RAM speeds of DIMM slots are actually significantly slower than the RAM speeds of soldered chips. Modern chips are hugely dependent on RAM speeds for optimum performance and with the way the M1/M2 platform evolved from smartphones and tablets where everything is close to the CPU/GPU and soldered down I'd expect their chips to be optimised for this layout.

Apple is blatantly anti upgrade (just see the SSD situation on their desktop offerings) but that's not the only reason they solder stuff down.

I believe Dell is working on a new, open design for PCBs where this performance problem is smaller or even nonexistent. You lose the ability to do partial upgrades with the new system but gain the performance impact that is driving some companies to soldering down RAM for performance reasons.

For devices with slower RAM there is no excuse. Just an upsell to make you pay $100 for 8GiB of RAM.

I would prefer to have 32 Gb of cheap "slow" 3200 MT/s RAM rather than 4 or 8 Gb of soldered 4300 MT/s LPDDR4 RAM. The increase in speed isn't worth decrease in size.

Also, in cheap laptops soldered RAM often has lower speeds, same as replaceable one.

And if RAM has to be soldered, then the board with CPU, GPU and RAM could be made replaceable so that you can upgrade it later without buying a new device. Obviously, manufacturers don't want that.

> And if RAM has to be soldered, then the board with CPU, GPU and RAM could be made replaceable so that you can upgrade it later without buying a new device. Obviously, manufacturers don't want that.

Dell is on a new replaceable RAM standard. It's already been designed for their own products, but they're working with JEDEC to make it a standard: https://www.storagereview.com/review/dell-camm-dram-the-new-...

I also prefer upgradeable laptops over bleeding edge performance but the reality is that most consumers never upgrade their laptops (and if they do, only to add more storage). Until a large amount of customers start factoring repairability and upgradeability into their purchasing decisions, we'll only see soldered down RAM.

I don't know about the specifics of DDR5, and specifically LPDDR5, as used by Apple, but many other manufacturers solder their chips, although their specs say that the speed is the same as in models with separate DIMMs.

One such example is the HP Elitebook 1040 G9. The tablet-like version has soldered RAM, whereas the regular has external modules. They both use 4800 MHz DDR5.

Regarding Apple Silicon, they claim that their soldered LPDDR5-6400 RAM can provide 100Gb/s of bandwith (per one chip?), which is amazing, but it seems that the CPU cannot fully utilize this bandwith.

For comparison, a cheap removable DDR4 module at 3200MT/s can provide theoretical bandwith around 25 Gb/s and two of them can provide 50 Gb/s which is also very fast (for me) and good enough for many tasks. More expensive DDR5 modules can provide up to 50 Gb/s bandwidth per module, and four of them give you 200 Gb/s of theoretical throughput.

So I don't see problems with using removable DDR5 modules. They are good enough, and being able to expand RAM cheaply is more important, than getting 2x bandwidth, that you cannot utilize, at a premium price.

Out of curiosity I decided to look at cheap laptops in my country. One of them is $240 Irbis NB77 laptop with IPS display, 2Gb of RAM (soldered as I understood), 4-core Atom Z3735F CPU, only 2 USB ports, 32 Gb of eMMC and, the worst of all, Windows 10, which probably will take all of the space on a drive.

But of course there are cheaper laptops with 4Gb RAM, so this one seems more like an exception. There are even tablets that cost less and have 12 Gb of RAM, although they are sold by suspicious sellers from China.

> Atom Z3735F

That's Bay Trail Atom. Launch date: Q1'14, two years after the platform launch, two years before the platform sees the latest release.

Or this is old new stock (of Bay Trail Atoms?) of something completely insane. Come on, 8 years! I had Acer W4-821 tablet with similar CPU in 2014! And was quite hampered by an upgrade to Win10, though I managed to run Virtual Box with CentOS on it to live test some code.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/80274/i...

for 245€ I can get a refurbished Lenovo T470 with FullHD display, i5 7300U, 256GB SSD, and 8GB DDR4 RAM (and a Windows 10 Pro licence)...

There's absolutely no point in buying new cheap laptops these days.., Big businesses are always getting rid of 5 year old laptops because their 5-year warranty expired, and the prices get low because they're old, but those 5 year old laptops are comparable to 1 year old laptops these days, cause in 2017-2021 there has been 0 improvements in the laptop world...

I wanted to replace my top of the line 2017 Dell XPS 9560 in 2021 after 4 years of use and literally didn't find any laptop that was noticeably better to justify paying for it....

The laptop I had supported 4 Gb (due to artificial limitations by Intel), but it started to switch off randomly and I found out that if you remove one (any) of RAM cards, then it can work without any issues. So this is how you can have a 2Gb device in 2022.

Having two laptops is twice better than having just one, so I decided to continue using it. Maybe I will connect it as a virtual monitor for a second laptop (then 2 Gb should be enough), but I am not sure if Wayland supports this.

Also, even if new laptos have 4+ Gb of RAM, there are still 5-10 years old models in use.

>So this is how you can have a 2Gb device in 2022.

Can you please point out which laptop in 2022 is being sold with 2GB of ram limitation? Really curious.

The smallest I could find for sale in my country is 4GB and I had to look really hard as they're not cheaper than buying something with 8GB of ram or they're just ARM Chromebooks.

Even most budget chinese Android phones rarely ship with less than 4GB of RAM anymore. So you made me very curious about 2GB laptops retailing in 2022.

Edit: wow, why the downvotes guys? Is it against the rules to aske questions?

Found 2Gb laptop, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33932592

In which country can you buy that product retail locally? (not via AliExpress as that moves the goalposts considering all the weird stuff you can find there)

In Russia. The store website [1] says that they can deliver it within 2 hours, so it can be bought locally. Irbis seems to be a brand of cheap laptops targeted at Russia, so it might be not known in other countries or they are sold there under another brand.

By the way, one of the buyers wrote that it is "great for studying" and another wrote that "it is confortable to use with Linux".

[1] https://www.dns-shop.ru/product/829ba65324bded20/133-noutbuk...

Anything with Celeron instead of the processor and a year-two old.

There are tons of refurbs, new-old stock and blatant lies on Amazon so you can really expect someone who doesn't know shit (eg only knows and bother about persistent memory, completely oblivious about RAM) can buy a device with 2Gb RAM in 2022.