4GB is fine on a proper operating system. I’d still be using my 2011 mba with debian if it wasn’t for the fan noise.
If you genuinely need more, good for you buy something more powerful. Most folks just use web browsers, and if you stay out of the chromium ecosystem those tend to be relatively lightweight in my experience.
I’m also of the opinion we should abandon the modern web and shift back to gopher but that’s just like, my opinion, man
Saw this coming when Microsoft admitted to have bought up loads of hardware they couldn’t actually use yet. I’m convinced the data centre build out is to hoard all the computing capacity so we are forced to use their cloud services because our own hardware isn’t capable.
If this keeps up in a couple generations every personal computing device will essentially be a thin client with everything running remotely for a subscription.
Nothing quite like offloading all the heavy lifting to massive data centers in the cloud, only to bottleneck your $2,000 laptop because a todo-list app needed its own dedicated copy of Chrome just to render three lines of text.
That sounds disgusting. I’m willing to fall back to like DDR2 and my Core 2 Duo again, if it means maintaining my digital sovereignty.
Fuck their subscriptions. I’ll game locally on the thin clients if I have to. 2034, 512MB of RAM? It will fucking run Doom! Fuck it I remember running a Minecraft server with 768MB of system memory back in 2011. It worked for over 10 people.
Its going to be odd having really powerful CPUs and being limited by memory, what that leaves us able to run or not and how well it will run. Discord should be sweating, return to IRC!
Jokes on them, I have converted my entire workflow to be as simple as possible and I like playing retro games. I am good with using old “outdated” hardware.
Hell my laptop is 10+ years old now.
Tbh, thanks to Wirth’s Law there’s a lot of unoptimized code out there. With the squeeze on hardware there’s incentive for developers to actually give a shit about making their software run well so they can maintain/build their userbase.
Don’t get me wrong, the current hardware situation is bullshit, but there’s ways to minimize its impact on consumers
Thanks. I didn’t know that had a name.
I hate wasting resources. The service i work on processes millions of transactions a month on a $14 AWS instance with spare capacity. Did I need to do that? No. But wherever we have performance issues I like to fix it before scaling the instance up. It was on the $7 instance for a while but 1GB memory wasn’t quite cutting it.
Unused RAM is RAM wasted /s
Yeah but then the companies would have to pivot from using AI everywhere
That’s always been the end goal. They have the capacity and the money for that now
Except stuff do get more powerful over time, even a mobile phone is quite capable today, no need for a thin client there.
Fuck those hoarders though.
Sadly I fear worse, the bulk of people will adapt in the stupidest way…
What’s coming… is obvious. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be an absurd amount more data centers than use for them… and all the hardware is in forms that aren’t going to be convertable into consumer devices.
What’s going to happen is what microsoft, amazon, and google have been dreaming of for a decade… Remember google Stadia, Luna etc…
People won’t be buying PCs… they will be buying, thin clients. Your PC will just stream your hardware from a data center. The music and movie industries will be happy because the providers can scan for pirated content… governments may flat out ban individuals from owning personal computers, that’s a security risk they can’t control, they are already looking into bills to prevent personal AI systems. No worries of people bypassing age verification, or running custom OS’s or firmware that can’t be controlled.
Best of all it’s super profitable, instead of a few grand for a one time purchase, they can hit you up every month… and gradually raise the prices like cable, like movie streaming. Maybe even vendor lockouts… you gotta stream an MS computer to get access to office 365, but you’ll also need an amazon subscription to run some other applications, or games or whatever they locked in exclusivity for.
What you describe needs continued investment into datacenters, which will be a no go when the bubble pops. The hardware doesn’t last forever (avg. life expectancy is somewhere around 6 years iirc), and running that hardware also isn’t free at all.
Add to that that you can nowadays run Cyberpunk 2077 on medium detail with 60 FPS on a freaking Android Phone with FEX and Proton, and personal computing is far from dead, regardless of what they want.
Edit: I’d rather expect mainboards that make HBM available for consumer PCs to pop up, and that hardware for personal inference drops in price dramatically.
Yep. Don’t forget that BC-250 crypto cards are being retrofitted into Steam Machines by consumers. The DIY community can do a lot
At that point you connect your phone to a screen and use that to handle what is needed for paying bills and schoolwork instead of yet another subscription. It’s after the AI bubble pops, so Greatest Depression time and nobody got spare cash for more services.
Lol Win11 on 8GB. My job got me that at first, i was at 95% usage on idle.
Let’s see the positive part of it! Now programmers will have to learn how to actually optimise their programs and NOT to use Electron, Tauri and any other hybrid framework ever again!! /s
Looks around Oh fu- Everyones just vibecoding their shit
Guys guys chill. Just use Claude to reverse engineer everything you use in Rust and it’ll all fit in 4gb
Silver lining? Just maybe software vendors might be a little more careful with memory usage.
I won’t hold my breath though.
Nah, everything’s gonna be a web app
Wait no, everything’s already a fucking web app
I quite like web also in my browser.
I despise electron “apps”.
Honestly if an electron app is done well it’s fine to me. Issue is that electron is most used as a crutch for a dogshit project
Soon, apps will be an emulated electron frame within your browser, so you can have chrome in chrome while both race to eat all your RAM
Welcome to the Brazilian personal computer experience. Enjoy!
Meanwhile at the Microsoft Store
Just wait until AI sends most of us back to a time when we were unemployed.
8gb don’t fit windows 11 plus chrome
Why the fuck is anyone still using Chrome when there’s so many good forks of Firefox? I refuse to use any browser that doesn’t support adblockers on principal. I haven’t willingly seen an ad in over a decade and I’m not about to start doing that again.
Maybe Windows 12 is just around the corner, with dark mode as default and completely focused on AI. So basically just a black box with text input and output. Have we seen that before?
That’s why I run Linux, then Chrome can be unleashed. Who needs all those dumb spyware services gobbling up ram in the background or an update service that installs in the background only to snipe your presentation for an update.
I also enjoy that Linux will roll upgrades easy-peasy, unlike Windows where “ope, you’ve gotta buy new hardware because we’re bankrolled by OEMs”
I need to be honest here. I bought my current “gaming” laptop in 2020 because my PC got struck by lightning right at the height of the last GPU crisis and I needed something. It came with 8gb of RAM, upgradable to 32 gb. I have never needed more. That system runs Cyberpunk at 100 steady fps, and I have no desire to play anything more graphically intense than that.
That being said, I wanted to upgrade last year because it was possible. I looked up the price for SO-DIMM RAM right after it skyrocketed and said “nope, I’m good”.
That is no longer a laptop
They can make more money selling fewer items for higher prices. As long as there are people who can buym the prices will go up. Even the Chinese chip contenders are selling under performing products for the same or higher prices than the established ones.
