[thomastjeffery]

> I personally think the downside of soldered RAM is overblown.

It is now, but only because it wasn't before. Narratives are slower to change than their subjects, especially in tech.

When soldered RAM started to take off, it was usually 1-2GB, which, even at the time, was a painful compromise. Even a lightweight Linux distro running a browser (i.e ChromeOS) will feel the limits of 4GB.

Now, most laptops have at least 8GB, which is good enough for most. 16GB is plenty unless you have some specialized workload that actually uses more, like compiling a large codebase or video editing.

64GB on a laptop is absurd. Whatever workload you have that needs that much memory should almost definitely run on a remote server anyway.

[alluro2]

8GB is hardly good enough for most, with proliferation of Electron apps everywhere and browsers being such memory hogs.

I am easily utilizing all of my 32GB just normally running a browser, email client, Slack, database mgmt tool, a couple of light servers (e.g. NodeJS, Redis for local dev), VS Code, Figma and a Git client. I would definitely get 64GB for my next work laptop, and I don't consider myself special in my needs in any way as a developer, nor would anything significantly change if I used remote servers.

So your generalization might be a bit off.

[prmoustache]

I have yet to see a use case where I need and can't replace a shitty electron app with a native one or its web equivalent running in a browser tab or window.

I have a laptop with 32GB, the only use case where I was maxing out the memory was when I was running a 6 nodes kubernetes cluster in vagrant virtual boxes.

And that was kinda stupid because I could have run those VMs in a remote hypervisor.

[thomastjeffery]

> I am easily utilizing all of my 32G

But if you only had 16GB, would you notice?

Browsers will happily use the RAM you give them, because they are caching everything they touch. With any relatively new NVMe SSD, that cache is probably close enough.