I love to bash MS, but this feels like an industry-wide trend to /never/ care about optimizing beyond the bar of “typical specs of new devices in rich countries”. I’m guessing it’s just to limit labor costs, and computers are less-rapidly-improving than the 90s/00s?
Code optimization has pretty much fallen by the way side since ram prices keep going down and cpu performance keeps improving.
Why spend the time if you don’t have to?
Browsers are some of the worst culprits.
premature optimization is the root of all evil - Donald Knuth
which does not excuse a total lack of optimization, but gotta hit those kpi’s
Jesus Christ, what are they doing? Emulating the OS in fucking Minecraft!?
The article mentions AI. 16gigs feels far too little to run a LLM of respectable size so I wonder what exactly this means? Feels like no one is gonna be happy about a 16gig LLM (high RAM usage and bad AI features)
linux needs like 1gb of ram and some distros even less
It already should have that. 8 GB is the absolute bare fucking minimum for most computers these days, but unless you have 16, it’s a generally unpleasant experience.
8 GB is the absolute bare fucking minimum for most computers these days
I keep seeing this statement all around the web but it is still amazing that we need that much RAM even for today.
Don’t get me wrong, I know 8 GB is becoming the standard even for mobile phones, so it is only logical to assume to bump this number for PCs (why no 12 GBS of RAM? IDK) and I have been using 16 GBs of RAM for 10 years now, it is a MacBook Pro and for me Apple does not make it clear to see how much of that RAM I’m actually using… Regardless RAM has never been a problem for me, with casual usage, and I always thought 8 GBs should work the same for even a lighter usage, why do I say that? Because before moving to such a Mac I used a laptop with 4 GBs of RAM around 2011-2014 and it was a pain in the ass to use (the processor was shit as well) for simple navigation for my thesis… So yeah if you think 8 GBs is bad, try 4 GBs.
Another reason I think 8 GBs is “a high amount for casual usage” is that my work PC had also 4 GBs of RAM, but there was not a reason to hoard tabs and such, so it was very manageable (also the processor wasn’t shit, but it was like a Core i5 or something like that, the usual office PCs you see and know), if we are talking about bottlenecks it would be the shitty HDD speeds LMAO.
What I think you guys all mean with 8 GBs of RAM is the bare minimum for nowadays standard is if you use it for IT related topics or you like to hoard stuff in it (which ain’t bad, unused RAM is wasted RAM after all) or simply depend on heavy programs which ain’t the web browser, for casuals I’d say 6 GBs would be a fair number, although it is not usual, and fuck 4 GBs of RAM in 2024, for any kind of device lol (I bet offices still use that dog shit).
Anyway I’d personally aim for 16 GBs of RAM or more regardless, for any of my future purchases, because I like to keep my stuff for years to come.
Oh no! I won’t be able to run Windows on my new MacBook Pro!
I have 16gb on my M2 Air, and 8gb on my 2014 mini. I’m genuinely surprised at how usable that mini still is. Hell, it’s running Sonoma through OCLP, but it’s only when I boot up the Win11 VM I have installed that it really starts to struggle.
