I remember when EMACS was "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"; there is something deeply fucking wrong with modern software if two thousand megabytes isn't enough for it to run smoothly.
These kids are truly spoiled. Even with 1GB today could be enough if you know how to set Unbound + a light browser.
If you need a pi because you want to run something on it that'll run just as well on a pi 2, then sure 2GB is perfectly fine. But if you actually need a pi 4, you need it because it is vastly more powerful and offers actually useful amounts of memory.
> a home use license for Mathematica is $300+
I have been happily using my RPi2 as a home dns, file and media server for at least a year now. While I agree it is constrained by memory, IO and compute, it is adequate for my purposes. Though I am upgrading to an RPi4 4GB, it is a nice upgrade, not a requirement (for me).
I presume there are some people who wish to run x86 binaries on Linux or Windows, for which a LattePanda might be a good fit at a modest cost. I wish them success, which is more fun than failure.
Is no SandyBridge either.
The devices are wildly different, with the amount of RAM available being far less important than the fact that your GF's laptop, with a vastly more complex motherboard, actually lets the OS efficiently use a swapfile. 2GB on a laptop goes a lot farther than 2GB on an Raspberry Pi.
Sure, the 2gb version is cheap, but it's also borderline useless if you want put a pi4 to use as a computer instead of fancy arduino.
And while they're both "computer-board-things", we can't really compare a LattePanda to a Pi: the only reason LattePanda boards exist is because they allow the same kind of prototyping/embedding as the pi, but specifically for windows. There is very little reason to buy one unless you _need_ a board that runs regular windows (because you need to run closed source, windows-only tools, for instance).