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Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

> The only people who win from benchmark optimization are those with 16-32 Gb of RAM (for example, Google employees).

Limiting RAM has become a silly market segmentation tactic, and I’d say there is absolutely no reason to buy a PC with less than 16 GB of RAM these days. It’s downright stupid you can still buy machines with 6 GB. Better to buy several generations down or used—old CPUs are still perfectly serviceable unless you’re planning to submit to some serious C++/Rust compiler punishment. (Says the person with an 8GB dual-core Haswell that is showing definite signs of obsolescence, but I still stand by my words.)

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Exactly. The examples are Mac laptops with soldered memory, which several years later will still have a great screen, case, fast CPU, but will be unusable due to having too little RAM. In the best case the user will have to buy a new motherboard and throw away perfectly working CPU and GPU, and in the worst case buy a new device.

Also, even 15-year old CPUs are still pretty fast and can do billions arithmetic operations per second. Only because Intel decided not to add several more address lines which cost them basically nothing, these machines have to be thrown away.

> I’d say there is absolutely no reason to buy a PC with less than 16 GB of RAM these days.

You know, people don't have unlimited money.

> You know, people don't have unlimited money.

Of course. I mean that as far as I can see one should normally save on just about everything else, including going back multiple CPU generations (let alone giving up on a discrete GPU) and buying a used laptop instead of a new one (in case it’s a laptop), before opting for less RAM. (I’m not including Chromebooks in this calculation, as those have never been available to me.)

Is it also downright stupid that people still use computers with 4 GB of RAM for browsing? Asking for a friend.

People use what they have, I won’t blame them for it. (Although the notion that web apps—such as Facebook, GMail, Google Docs, or PDF.js—are less resource-intensive than “normal” desktop usage does not seem to hold much water to me, and those are usually included when a machine is said to be used “just for web browsing”. So if the experience ends up quite miserable I won’t be surprised.) But I’ve shopped for a laptop for a relative some months ago and am a bit testy about how manufacturers seem to be saving money on frickin’ RAM (or more realistically segmenting the market using it). Just... don’t fall for it if you have a choice.

if the RAM is upgradable then I'd say yes.. 8GB RAM stick costs ~25€ and anyone with a screwdriver can make the swap...

if it's not upgradable then it's up to the user to determine if it's worth it to replace the whole laptop, but if it has 4GB of RAM its other specs are probably gonna be outdated as well and you can buy very good refurbished laptops for under 300€ these days...

4 Gb is not enough for browsing, at least with Firefox on Linux with more than 10 tabs.

4Gb is more than enough with Firefox on Linux with more than 30 tabs assuming you use uBlock Origin and uMatrix :)

Source: did just that on a daily basis on my recently replaced 10 year old laptop. I probably would have even been able to handle 2Gb assuming Firefox was the only application running.

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