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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Apple offering 8GB RAM in a $1,600 laptop is especially egregious, but small RAM sizes are an endemic across most laptop brands. In a desktop getting 128GB is no problem, beyond that you reach the realm of "workstations" with a significant price hike. Yet even high-end laptops frequently only offer a range from 8GB to 32GB, with the occasional 64GB for a specific model at high markup.

I get the trend to soldered-on memory. I don't like it from a longevity standpoint, but it does provide space and performance benefits. But why are all laptops so low on memory?

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Because of space constraints and power constraints. It isn't only the space for the memory that you need. You also need space on the die for the memory controller, caches and the memory channels.

If you look at annotated die shots of these CPUs you can see that the memory controllers use significant space on the die. So if you wanted to add more memory you needed to remove something else on the chip. Also you might need to change the cache hierarchy and the layout of the chip.

Like everything else in chip design this is a trade off. And the chip designers make different trade offs for server CPUs that can support up to multiple terabytes of RAM. If there were a big enough demand for a mobile chip with more RAM they would probably make one.

[1] die shots: https://twitter.com/highyieldYT/status/1719379808516280716

Edit: I might have misunderstood the OP.

The two biggest reasons are laptops have only 8 or 16 GB memory because most people don't need any more than that and the people that need more are willing to pay the markup.

No one is asking for terabytes of RAM in a laptop. I have two 16GB SODIMMs installed right now on a consumer laptop with a consumer processor that I'm typing this on.

So it's hard to chock this up to anything but nonsense.

I might have misunderstood the OP. High end models are more expensive because the people that buy them are either businesses or enthusiasts. So they either have a monetary gain from the higher performance or they just want the best thing. SO both of them will pay a reasonable markup.

Another reason is that the high-end laptops are a low volume product so this increases the cost of handling them. So naturally you would have consider this in the price.

Sure, a reasonable markup, but we're talking about a company that will sell you a charging cable for $100+ with a straight face.

Which cable is that?

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MN713AM/A/thunderbolt-4-u...

Bit of a stretch to call that a "charging cable." Their 240W rated 2 meter USB-C charging cable is $30 https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU2G3AM/A/

But if you're interested in why the Thunderbolt cable costs more than charging cables, some folks put one through a CT scanner recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5aAd8Oy84

That's fair, as it does more than just charge.

Let's take another example from Apple:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand

In a similar vein, the $700 Mac Pro wheels kit

I hear they roll very smoothly, and since they don't have brakes you may need to re-level your floor to keep the computer from rolling away

The other one

They’re low volume because they’re unreasonably expensive, not the other way around.

which is why the only laptops in my home are the ones purchased by my employer.

It limits product lifetimes and customers fail to refuse the crippled products. Most customers will notice that the <8GiB laptops are sluggish to unusable for more than "light browsing and office work", but don't understand that it's the lack of RAM (combined with slow eMMC flash in the worst offenders).

Most customers don't purchase laptops by RAM capacity and instead by the cheapest crap with a bright low resolution display. It's too tempting for companies to remove the second memory channel and half the memory capacity to reduce cost. Why would they loose money on long lasting fast machines if the cheaper to crap sells a higher larger margin (and has to be replaced frequently)?

> with the occasional 64GB for a specific model at high markup.

That's very much the point of soldered-down RAM, isn't it? 64GB kit (2x32GB) of 260-pin (SO-DIMM) DDR4 modules show up around $110 on amazon. But why would manufacturer give customers such option, if they can be forced to buy whole new laptop instead?

It has a lot more to do with physical space of the SODIMM slots, and in Apple's case the raw performance of on-die memory.

If you have talented engineers this is a solvable problem.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21069/modular-lpddr-becomes-a...

Battery life is significant worse with 32GB ram and laptop reviews often place heavy emphasis on battery life. By offering an 8Gb base model for reviews the manufacturer ensures their laptop will score well in reviews, even if users end up buying a higher spec laptop. It also allows users who want to multitask less to get more out of their laptop.

On desktop the impact of power consumption is lower, so it is better to offer a slightly higher spec base model.

>> Yet even high-end laptops frequently only offer a range from 8GB to 32GB, with the occasional 64GB for a specific model at high markup.

The Lenovo P-series workstations offer 128GB for the low price of $669

> But why are all laptops so low on memory?

Penny pinching, artificial segmentation, and planned obsolescence.

I dont think we even need 16GB as standard, they could have pushed 12GB instead. And that extra 4GB makes a world of difference for vast majority of user. User can then paid extra for 16GB or higher.

I see the lowball "base" model as a way to advertise the middle models, which is a common strategy. That being said, from what I gather, 8GB RAM on MacOS performs just fine except for truly professional users. Also keep in mind that it might have significantly more bandwidth than a typical DDR4/LPDDR5 8GB config. I couldn't find numbers for 8GB specifically, but 24GB on base M3 is 100GBps. If 8GB has the same controller, then it would be 2x-4x faster than non-Apple memory.

Extra RAM eats battery life on laptops, particularly in sleep mode.

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