alt Hacker NewsFor last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs).
Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing.
New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g., new phones with Snapdragon Gen 6, UFS2.2). Meanwhile, features that were being offered in budget phones, e.g., wireless charging, NFC, UFS3.1 have silently been moved to the premium mobile segment.
Meanwhile the OSes and software are becoming more and more complex, bloated and more unstable (bugs) and insecure (security loopholes ready for exploits).
It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else.
And this will be a huge setback for humanity, especially the students and scientific communities.
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This is what I find a bit alarming, too. My M3 Max MacBook Pro takes 2 full seconds to boot Slack, a program that used to literally be an IRC client. Many people still believe client-side compute is cheap and worrying about it is premature optimization.
Of course, some performance-focused software (e.g. Zed) does start near-instantly on my MacBook, and it makes other software feel sluggish in comparison. But this is the exception, not the rule.
Even as specs regress, I don't think most people in software will care about performance. In my experience, product managers never act on the occasional "[X part of an app] feels clunky" feedback from clients. I don't expect that to change in the near future.
I think a lot of this rings true, but what makes it especially frustrating is that none of it feels technically necessary
Or, we can expect better from software. Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use.
The pattern of lazy almost non existent optimization combined with blaming consumers for having weak hardware, needs to stop.
On my 16GB ram lunar lake budget laptop CachyOS( Arch) runs so much smoother than Windows.
This is very unscientific, but using htop , running Chrome/YouTube playing music, 2 browser games and VS code having Git Copilot review a small project, I was only using 6GBs of ram.
For the most part I suspect I could do normal consumer stuff( filing paperwork and watching cat videos) on an 8GB laptop just fine. Assuming I'm using Linux.
All this Windows 11 bloat makes computers slower than they should be. A part of me hopes this pushes Microsoft to at least create a low ram mode that just runs the OS and display manager. Then let's me use my computer as I see fit instead of constantly doing a million other weird things.
We don't *need* more ram. We need better software.
I'm reading this thread on an 11-year-old desktop with 8GB of RAM and not feeling any particular reason to upgrade, although I've priced it out a few times just to see.
Mint 22.x doesn't appear to be demanding any more of my machine than Mint 20.x. Neither is Firefox or most websites, although YouTube chat still leaks memory horrendously. (Of course, download sizes have increased.)
I think it is the result of specs like RAM and CPU no longer being the selling point it once was, except for gaming PCs. Instead people want thin laptops, good battery life, nice screens, premium materials, etc... We have got to the point where RAM and CPU are no longer a limiting factor for most tasks, or at least until software become bloated enough to matter again.
If you want a powerful laptop for cheap, get a gaming PC. The build quality and battery life probably won't be great, but you can't be cheap without making compromises.
Same idea for budget mobiles. A Snapdragon Gen 6 (or something by Mediatek) with UFS2.2 is more than what most people need.
> Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs
it was only less than 10 yrs ago that a high end PC would have this level of ram. I think the last decade of cheap ram and increasing core count (and hz) have spoiled a lot of people.
We are just returning back on trend. May be software would be written better now that you cannot expect the average low budget PC to have 32G of ram and 8 cores.
I wonder what we can do to preserve personal computing, where users, not vendors, control their computers? I’m tired of the control Microsoft, Apple, Google, OpenAI, and some other big players have over the entire industry. The software has increasingly become enshittified, and now we’re about to be priced out of hardware upgrades.
The problem is coming up with a viable business model for providing hardware and software that respect users’ ability to shape their environments as they choose. I love free, open-source software, but how do developers make a living, especially if they don’t want to be funded by Big Tech?
I think it will be a good thing actually. Engineers, no longer having the luxury of assuming that users have high end system specs, will be forced to actually write fast and efficient software. No more bloated programs eating up RAM for no reason.
No dedicated GPU is certainly unrelated to whatever been happening for last two years.
It's just in last 5 years integrated GPUs become good enough even for mid-tier gaming let alone running browser and hw accel in few work apps.
And even before 5 years ago majority of dedicated GPUs in relatively cheap laptops was garbage barely better than intrgrated one. Manufacturers mostly put them in there for marketing of having e.g Nvidia dGPU.