Why do they still make laptops with 8 GB Memory

[sapphirescales]

The cheap home laptops for 400 bucks I'm fine with 8gb of ram because a lot of them don't multitask much...but any business machine should have a minimum of 16gb for sure.

8GB of RAM costs $30. There's no reason why 16GB shouldn't be standard even on $400 laptops.

It's bad enough that companies are selling laptops with only 8GB of RAM but it's absolutely CRIMINAL that they're soldering the RAM onto the board and not providing any expansion slots so you're forever stuck at 8GB. The worst offender of course is Apple, who sells a 15" MacBook Air for $1,500 with only 8GB of permanently soldered RAM but it seems everyone is doing this nowadays. I just had a client who wanted to buy a new Surface Laptop Go but I recommended against it of course because Surface devices are so disposable. He insisted though so I bought a 1st gen Surface Laptop Go with 16GB of RAM new old stock for $300 and sold it to him for $600. Better than spending $1,000 on the Surface Laptop Go 3 in order to get 16GB of RAM. I also upgraded the SSD from 250GB to 1TB for an additional $200.

 

[britechguy]

You need to remember that you are in a different environment.

I just want to say a big, "Thank you, and amen!," for this observation.

I try my darndest to remember who here is an MSP serving primarily small and medium businesses, versus who is residential break-fix and also serves tiny business such as myself.

The needs in these environments, for all sorts of things, are quite different and trying to use a "one size fits all" approach is a bad idea. Feature matching, always.

 

[lan101]

8GB of RAM costs $30. There's no reason why 16GB shouldn't be standard even on $400 laptops.

It's bad enough that companies are selling laptops with only 8GB of RAM but it's absolutely CRIMINAL that they're soldering the RAM onto the board and not providing any expansion slots so you're forever stuck at 8GB. The worst offender of course is Apple, who sells a 15" MacBook Air for $1,500 with only 8GB of permanently soldered RAM but it seems everyone is doing this nowadays. I just had a client who wanted to buy a new Surface Laptop Go but I recommended against it of course because Surface devices are so disposable. He insisted though so I bought a 1st gen Surface Laptop Go with 16GB of RAM new old stock for $300 and sold it to him for $600. Better than spending $1,000 on the Surface Laptop Go 3 in order to get 16GB of RAM. I also upgraded the SSD from 250GB to 1TB for an additional $200.

I'm pretty sure even all the thinkpad laptops have 8gb soldered as well and then 1 additional slot or maybe on the high ends an extra slot or 2. I think even the P series ones do that now which is just silly. More disposable stuff to throw away sooner.

 

[Appletax]

I'm pretty sure even all the thinkpad laptops have 8gb soldered as well and then 1 additional slot or maybe on the high ends an extra slot or 2. I think even the P series ones do that now which is just silly. More disposable stuff to throw away sooner.

Right! This is frustrating as heck. Soldered RAM needs to die. When soldered RAM goes bad, you need a whole new motherboard, which is big bucks $$$.

Also, I make sure all my clients have at least 8GB of RAM in their systems (if possible) as I consider it to be the bare minimum for everyone. It blows my mind that computers today come with 4GB of RAM. The cheapest brand new computers should have 8GB.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The vendors always want to advertise lowest price. Especially big box stores.
We standardized a while ago...16 gigs for new computers for our clients.

I'm barely using over half of my 16 gigs...
We're big "Teams" users (classic version)...of course, quite a few file explorer folders synced with the Teams/SP document libraries.
Outlook (classic version)
Quad monitors so I have several Chrome instances on 3x monitors, and an Edge instance. Probably an Incognito chrome tab open too. Loom...is desktop/video recording software.
I can't even break 10 gigs of use yet!
But yeah, we just order our clients computers with 16 gigs...have for quite a while.

 

[Metanis]

The vendors always want to advertise lowest price. Especially big box stores.
We standardized a while ago...16 gigs for new computers for our clients.

I'm barely using over half of my 16 gigs...
We're big "Teams" users (classic version)...of course, quite a few file explorer folders synced with the Teams/SP document libraries.
Outlook (classic version)
Quad monitors so I have several Chrome instances on 3x monitors, and an Edge instance. Probably an Incognito chrome tab open too. Loom...is desktop/video recording software.
I can't even break 10 gigs of use yet!
But yeah, we just order our clients computers with 16 gigs...have for quite a while.
View attachment 15531
View attachment 15532

That damn snipping tool is sure a hog!

 

[NETWizz]

All I said was “battery life stinks,” and they order me a new laptop.

i think it’s funny they bought me some fancy 3-in-1 tablet without even asking. I think it even has a stylus, lol… and it has a 13th gen Intel i7 to replace my 11th gen woek laptop.

Is it really so much to expect a laptop to run all day on a charge? If I am troubleshooting, or deploying switches I never want to get close to being out of power.

First thing I do worh a laptop is plug in my Logitech M500 mouse. I have an M500 at home, one at work, and one in my go bag. I think I have an extra one in my closet too. I find something I like and buy a bunch of them. The one on the desk at work they paid for.

 

[Fred Claus]

Why do they still make laptops with 8 GB of memory?

At work they ordered me some new fancy Dell All-In-On tablet/laptop machine with an Intel 13th generation i7 of some kind. Of coruse, I checked and it has 8 GB of RAM (soldered onto the motherobard), so I refusedi it.

Why does Dell, HP, and all those companies even offer less than say 16 GB of RAM this day and age?

It wouldn't be a problem, but we have bean counters who have zero (0) It knowledge. All they do is procure stuff. These are the type of people that end up buying things with a touch screen, tablet capability, some stupid stylist, and perhaps a 13900 or 13700 CPU ... but not enough RAM to open Chrome, Outlook, and Excel at the same time. It's nuts!

My Mother in law has a laptop with 4 gb of RAM and an AMD A6-7310 processor

 

[britechguy]

My Mother in law has a laptop with 4 gb of RAM and an AMD A6-7310 processor

But when was it purchased? I had an AMD A6 in the household until this past January, but it was purchased some years ago. It was a Toshiba laptop, so that gives you an idea of how long ago since they went out of the computer business and what was left of it became Dynabook.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

My Mother in law has a laptop with 4 gb of RAM and an AMD A6-7310 processor

OOoofff.....much as I love AMD and their Ryzen CPUs...those A CPUs were dogs...just...horrible. Could almost write out the zero's and ones faster with a pencil! And Intel Celeron could spank it, and an A6 could barely beat an Atom...if it was having a good day.

 

[Fred Claus]

OOoofff.....much as I love AMD and their Ryzen CPUs...those A CPUs were dogs...just...horrible. Could almost write out the zero's and ones faster with a pencil! And Intel Celeron could spank it, and an A6 could barely beat an Atom...if it was having a good day.

I agree. It takes forever to do things on this computer. She's constantly calling me to fix it, and I try to explain to her it's a hardware problem and she just needs to get a new machine.

 

[johnrobert]

Why do they still make laptops with 8 GB of memory?

At work they ordered me some new fancy Dell All-In-On tablet/laptop machine with an Intel 13th generation i7 of some kind. Of coruse, I checked and it has 8 GB of RAM (soldered onto the motherobard), so I refusedi it.

Why does Dell, HP, and all those companies even offer less than say 16 GB of RAM this day and age?

It wouldn't be a problem, but we have bean counters who have zero (0) It knowledge. All they do is procure stuff. These are the type of people that end up buying things with a touch screen, tablet capability, some stupid stylist, and perhaps a 13900 or 13700 CPU ... but not enough RAM to open Chrome, Outlook, and Excel at the same time. It's nuts!

So they can upsell you
My daughter just bought a Mac Book from 8 to 16 was about $250 CAD, and the same with SSD 500 to a Gig another 250 came close to 3 grand.
I told her she was crazy but she gets the money back from work.

 

[dcomp12]

Soldered ones are terrible. Just the fact that something happens and your out of the warranty then your kind of hooped. Also yes i see a lot of 8GB Ram configurations with one stick! I mean you have a i7 and you cant even unlock the 2 channels for that processor. I mean, I'm happy to upgrade for them for sure. Basically comes down to price....just like the old days...and not too far back that new computers were still loading in 5400RPM drives...

 

[GTP]

My gaming rig has 16 gb ram. (2 x 8GB)

With Steam streaming a friends game on 1 monitor while I play the same game on another monitor and we use the voice chat option and have Signal open for chat to others, it uses no more than 6~7 gb ram.
If I also have a few (7 or 8) tabs open in Librewolf as well as email open on a third and fourth monitor it still uses no more than 8~9 gb ram.

I was thinking of adding another 16 gb that I recovered from an disused game PC, but I cant fathom why I'd need it.

 

[britechguy]

but I cant fathom why I'd need it.

If people actually monitored the amount of RAM being used when they're doing the most demanding of the things they do, the push for overloading RAM would disappear.

Windows and all modern OSes will definitely exploit RAM to the maximum extent they can, but "the maximum extent they can" is directly based upon usage. If what you do at "the most stressful" is consuming only 6 to 7 GB of RAM, you're never going to be consuming 16 GB of RAM unless what you do changes, radically. That seldom happens.

I'm using 13.1 GB of 16 GB and that's with three web browsers with hundreds of tabs open between them, Microsoft Word with multiple documents open, and three File Explorer sessions. The "hogs" are Firefox and Vivaldi, with just short of 2 GB each, with Edge using 0.5 GB. It would take me a while to figure out how to consume 3 GB of additional RAM, and if I were "a more stringent housekeeper" with my web browsers I'd probably be able to knock out at least 2 GB of the 4.5 GB in use.

Excess RAM that never gets exploited is a dead asset. And it doesn't take much random checking to see how much is exploited in normal daily use, whatever that happens to be for a given individual and machine. You may need more on an 8 GB machine, but for the vast majority of cases you won't on a 16 GB machine.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

My gaming rig has 16 gb ram. (2 x 8GB)

With Steam streaming a friends game on 1 monitor while I play the same game on another monitor and we use the voice chat option and have Signal open for chat to others, it uses no more than 6~7 gb ram.
If I also have a few (7 or 8) tabs open in Librewolf as well as email open on a third and fourth monitor it still uses no more than 8~9 gb ram.

I was thinking of adding another 16 gb that I recovered from an disused game PC, but I cant fathom why I'd need it.

Depends on what you run for games (and for other cases....what programs you run)
Measuring RAM isn't always as simple as firing up task manager just to see what is currently being used.
Some programs will "consume what they can"...and some of those programs "will limit what they consume, based on what is available".

So if your current 16 gig system won't really past 12 gigs of consumption....sounds like you won't really benefit from double to 32 gigs.
But say you ran some game (or other program)...that would take 10 or 12 gigs...out of 16 gigs...leaving a little bit for other programs...giving you the impression that you still weren't "running out of RAM" yet. However...some programs were programmed "smart"...they will take what they can...up to some % of total system RAM. Say, 60%, or 75%. YET...if you double that computers RAM to 32 gigs...and then ran that game again, it may now go up to 20 or 22 gigs of RAM usage...and run quite a bit better.

Just saying..it's not always as simple as watching task mangler. That's certainly a good start...and fine for "most users"...but there are come exceptions with some programs with smart dynamic RAM consumption.

I no longer game, and am out of the public gaming server side biz I did. So I'm not up on some of the current games and their system performance and use.

 

[britechguy]

That's certainly a good start...and fine for "most users".

Which is the demographic I was referring to. Realtime multi-player gaming and 3D realtime rendering of any sort are in classes by themselves.

Given our audience here, I figure ror the most part they know where "the general case" ends and where "special cases" begin.

 

[Blues]

I see more bottleneck in CPU & GPU than RAM these days as outside of massive databases and tables most applications do not use or hold as much RAM. My most intensive tasks I have put my PC through are Gaming(Mostly older titles so not too taxing), Video Encoding (not that big on RAM), Crypto Mining (Most RAM intensive of my tasks)

I do more with DB & Tables at work and it does tax my RAM at work which is 16GB as well.

 

[johnrobert]

Why do they still make laptops with 8 GB of memory?

At work they ordered me some new fancy Dell All-In-On tablet/laptop machine with an Intel 13th generation i7 of some kind. Of coruse, I checked and it has 8 GB of RAM (soldered onto the motherobard), so I refusedi it.

Why does Dell, HP, and all those companies even offer less than say 16 GB of RAM this day and age?

It wouldn't be a problem, but we have bean counters who have zero (0) It knowledge. All they do is procure stuff. These are the type of people that end up buying things with a touch screen, tablet capability, some stupid stylist, and perhaps a 13900 or 13700 CPU ... but not enough RAM to open Chrome, Outlook, and Excel at the same time. It's nuts!

In the case of Apple to get more money

 

[brandonkick]

Windows, IIRC, will "use" more memory all depending on what it has available to it. So what the system will load and store in memory on an 4GB system, vs 8GB, vs 16GB is different. That's been my observation anyways. (at least 4 vs 8 for sure... I've personally watched it)

The real problem is browsers. They suck so bad at garbage collection / memory clean up. We have 30330303003 tabs open, but there are still even more dead tabs memory allocated in the system because the software just sucks. Most non power users, THIS is why they need 16GB of memory. They are the type of people to open 30+ tabs and several other office apps. Not unreasonable. But when your memory usage organically inflates because closed tabs don't always properly free back up all the memory they consumed.... and they consume a lot of memory even when they aren't having this problem.


That all aside, yeah. Memory is so cheap. Why not.

At the single business I was supporting, they recently had a user complaining of his machine getting slow. AutoCAD user. Gets in HUGE PDF files with 10X more **** in it than needed, but the general contractors aren't going to bother stripping out what each sub contractor needs when a new set of data comes in. So they send it all to everyone. Point being, these files hammer his system when loaded. That's because he has 8GB. I found him a 16GB upgrade for $20.