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Comment by vondur | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing a lot of that has to do with software that gets preinstalled on Windows machines. There was a article the other day about how bad it is releasing laptop in 2021 with only 8GB of RAM. I noticed people in that thread talking about how their laptops after startup are using 6-7GB of RAM , which means they must have a lot of processes going on in the background. I'd imagine cutting down all of the unnecessary background processes would really help with battery life on laptops.

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8GB is fine, the problem is all laptops are still shipped with 5400RPM harddrives. My mother bought a new $700 Inspiron from Dell, it's made of janky plastic and took 5 minutes to get to desktop and longer to do anything else. Replaced the 5400rpm drive with an SSD and it was plenty fast.

Oems are sabotaging themselves to get their customers to buy their $1200 laptops - which at that point people are instead buying macbooks.

As long as you’re ok with macOS, there simply is no competitor to MacBook Air for the needs for 90% of people, and there hasn’t been for nearly a decade in my opinion. It’s cheap, lightweight, fast, long battery life, and has a tried and true design since many years.

Older people need 17" screens.

Older people may not need laptops. Especially if they do not work. My grandparents just have a desktop.

I am in my 40s. I have spent 99.9% of my personal computing life not using a laptop.

I have zero interest getting one for the forseeable future.

Work assigns me one. It sits on my desk at work in the dock. It could be a desktop but company policy is "everyone gets a laptop".

shrug Each to their own.

> for the needs for 90% of people

You could say the same thing about a Chromebook. And they are half the price of a Macbook Air.

Google’s propensity to kill and change things every year is reason enough to not deal with their products. I certainly would not recommend it to someone who just wants it to work and get out of the way, and does not want to keep up with news about changes Google is making.

Chrome OS has been around for a good while.

That's true for many Google products, I've been burned myself by Daydream abandonment, but Chromebooks are widely used, provided by many companies, some have an 8 year support policy, and Google bought a company who's business is to support ChromeOS on legacy devices. So it's much bigger than one of their trial balloon products. I've been recommending them for years to different people who don't need a "full OS," and they've all been very happy with them. It's actually much less than half the price of a Macbook for a decent, IPS screen and even convertible/hybrid Chromebook like the Lenovo Duet. I find a lot of pushback from Windows enthusiasts, Apple people are more likely to suggest an iPad which I think is more reasonable, but for many activities a Chromebook is a great choice, and you can buy one and a handset for the same price as an Air.

I have 32GB RAM. 99% of the time I am under 8GB. While playing RAM intensive games like Minecraft 16GB is ok most of the time. However, I bought 32GB simply because that is how much I could get for 100€.

Android phones have a lot of crap preinstalled, too. Android tends to be much more ruthless about automatically terminating unnecessary processes, though.

Graphics also matter. My 6yo Inspiron let me develop with 8GB of RAM, last year I bought a new one with Ryzen5 set the very same link setup and even used the same SSD but it would began to freeze or crash...

The APU was reserving 3GB of RAM for the GPU. The next day I went for 8GB more.

Agreed, the last 4 laptops bought by my family, the ones with dedicated graphics are still going strong, but the ones with integrated intel graphics aged poorly despite having better CPU perf.

I don't think you understood what your parent meant. In their case the GPU was detrimental cause it was reducing the ram available to the rest of the system to 5gb.

APUs are integrated graphics. Only integrated graphics share system RAM. Dedicated GPUs get their own RAM.

This was the problem that surface laptops set out to solve by not preinstalling the crap that Microsoft hates (but can’t stop OEMs shipping). They were clearly at least partly successful but I guess they can’t get into the low end well enough.

In theory though, if that stuff is mostly dormant, it should eventually just get paged out and consume neither significant RAM nor CPU time.

Of course, that depends on that software not being horribly miswritten to wake up all the time.

Supporting that theory, I find that Chromebooks can get by with less RAM than their Windows equivalent (even when the Windows machine will only be used for the web, which is pretty common these days in my experience).

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