"Rising cost of memory," Microsoft explains why Windows 11 will use less RAM

If they had resisted the temptation to muck around with the GUI and permit people to bring their Vista era email tool into the modern view with less pain, A lot of suspicion around 7->10->11 would have gone.

And look what you did to my kid (Outlook, 10 to 11)

So yes to the memory stuff. But no to "we improved things because our design people needed a kpi"

Windows 10 was the most recent big push for memory reduction actually, back when MS still harbored ambitions in the smartphone space and wanted a single OS across smartphone, desktop, and server. The minimum RAM requirements for the 32-bit version of Windows 10 was 1GB.

Now we have smartwatches with 4GB of RAM (rolls eyes). WTF do they even do with all that memory?