I bought a new System 76 machine about this time last year, and splurged (by my standards) on 64GB of RAM. BEST. DECISION. EVAAAR. as far as I'm concerned. For probably the first time in my life, I feel like I can do basically whatever I want and not have to worry about RAM. Have 8 Firefox windows with 200 tabs open, 3 or 4 Eclipse instances, and a few server apps running, and want to launch a bunch of VM's with Vagrant? Done. Want to launch one more Eclipse instance? Not a problem. Opening another couple of dozen browser tabs? No sweat.

Of course that's not my normal mode of operation (well, except for the 200 tabs part), but the point is, I'm finally not limited by memory. I don't have to think about it now. I don't find myself always running "top" or "free -h" to try and figure out "OK, do I need to kill some stuff now?" and if so, "what should I kill?" Nope. Any and everything I do in my routine workflow fits in the scope of the hardware. It's incredibly liberating.

"Oh," the critics will say, "RAM that isn't used is wasted." To which I say "so fucking what? It's my RAM and I'll damn well waste it if I want."

It took me a week but think about switching to jetbrains. So far I’ve had 0 people regret my pressuring to get off eclipse. My old workplace didn’t blink about the expense and my new job has it as the standard kit. Just a thought even though it is a pain in the tush in the beginning.

I've tried it. And TBH, I don't get all the hype. It was usable, but I didn't see anywhere near enough appeal to justify investing the time/energy to learn Jetbrains as well as I've learned Eclipse over the years. And for its warts, Eclipse pretty much "just works" at this point, especially given that I have suitable hardware for it now. I think a lot of my issues with Eclipse in the past where pretty directly attributable to running on under-powered hardware.

As a collolary, RAM that's not being used by programs still gets used by the OS as a filesystem cache, so it still contributes towards the system feeling snappier.

I'm terrified to think that in a not-so-distant future we'll be complaining about laptops shipping with only 64 GB RAM. I bet it'll still be because of Electron.

I still remember upgrading my first PC from 1 meg of RAM to 4 meg. I thought I was a god, and couldn't imagine what I'd ever do with "all of this memory". Times change...

Who would be able to productively use 200 open browser tabs? Seems like a strange argument to waste even more resources on a more and more ruined planet.

Sometimes if I'm buying some stuff from Amazon I'll do a ton of research on each one, looking for alternatives, specs, discussions, reviews, etc. Each search can sometimes go up to 40-50 tabs, especially if I'm looking for a specific set of attributes in a product and I just can't find the perfect match. I'll do the searches in parallel and switch between them, so I'll keep everything open since closing and re-opening 50 tabs whenever I want to revisit a session is tedious. Getting to 200 tabs is pretty normal in these situations.

If you don't like hundreds of browser tabs, don't open hundreds of browser tabs. I'll keep my own counsel on how I manage my tabs.

If you ruin the planet it's not your private business anymore.

Sounds like a bit of a stretch. By this line of reasoning, it's not "your private business" that you breathe, since you are consuming oxygen and emitting carbon dioxide with every breath.

That's why uncontrolled population growth is not considered a sustainable pattern. But granting those who are already born the right to breathe few would dispute.

However, those consuming more resources than the share the planet has to offer for everyone are just denying others an equally good life. Either now or in a future generation. https://www.overshootday.org/

Rather useless growth of computer performance might not be the worst problem. But it's easy to address. I can tell you that working with an old 2 GB computer is no problem at all for many tasks with just a bit of thinking. (For sure there are tasks that require more memory. I also use such machines, but not all the time.)

Framework has recently announced availability of Intel 12th gen - still not AMD, but it's a fairly huge jump in performance from 11th gen.

And of course you can just order a replacement mainboard for your already purchased Framework laptop, which is awesome.

Yea, I admit, Framework makes an extremely compelling selling point here. If I buy a Framework laptop I can buy my own replacement parts and not have to ever deal with warranty service ever again. I can buy Rev 1 and then a few years later possibly buy a Rev 5 motherboard.. and maybe a Rev 5 lower shell to accommodate it or some other silly stuff.

It kinda reminds me of how some Thinkpad addicts went to crazy lengths to upgrade their 10 year old thinkpads with modern parts lol. Except this time it's official and supported.

That's awesome!

I think this HP is kinda tacky. I don't need a trackpoint and I don't want a keyboard offset to the side like that.

It is upgradeable to 64GB.

Am i wrong to think that for 1000 dollars this laptop should come with 32gb of ram? Though its great that one can upgrade the memory.

To put things into perspective, Apple charges $400 to upgrade from $16GB to $32GB.

So I’ll say that expecting 32GB RAM in a $1K laptop is a little too unrealistic.

I don't think you should use Apple to put upgrade pricing in perspective. They've used inflated pricing to extract extra money from a captive audience for many years. Other OEMs cannot demand similar premiums for commodity products.

Yes, I know Apple prices are highly inflated.

I was using it to highlight the unreasonable-ness, IMHO of course, of the above request.

They use on-SoC RAM chips, essentially a cheaper HBM instead of just some random SO-DIMMS.

I think a better comparison would be Dell or Lenovo who do the same thing HP does, and they too charge a lot for what are essentially OEM versions of Samsung and Hynix memory anyone can get.

But Apple charges ridiculous premiums for everything. For example, at https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-12-gen-intel/configur... it's only $80 more for 32GB than for 16GB.

What does "Linux laptop" mean? Are you basically paying $1000 for high quality drivers for all of the computer components?

More importantly, if companies keep on releasing Linux laptops and only laptops we may really never see the Year of the Linux desktop :(

Well linux on desktop mostly just works. Linux on laptops has been a headache for a while with awful battery life, trackpad issues, wifi issues and things like that. So personally I don't feel the need for any dedicated linux desktop release compared to the laptop space where I appreciate more of a guarantee that the drivers actually work and I won't spend all my time messing with linux internals trying to get it to work.

Not sure, what do other laptops in the same price segment offer these days? I admit it's been a while since I looked, but I really doubt anyone has 32gb on a 1000 dollars laptop, or even 1500.

I'd be fine with 16 and 1TB SSB, but only if both are upgradeable...

The ssd isnt too bad assuming theres usb 3/c to plug supplemental storage in, but thats jmo

I’m non-tech side and snorted at max 16GB for devs. GLWT HP. Concur with the other comment that said it’s a marketing exercise aimed at decision makers.

I don't get it, you can upgrade it. What's the problem? 16GB is not the maximum possible RAM.

Edit: I meant, you can upgrade it when speccing the laptop. The RAM is probably soldered.

Problem is it’s not a metal encased laptop with a partially bitten fruit on the back. If it had been that then people would have been happy to pay $2K for 8GB RAM and sing paeans and wait breathlessly to upgrade to next iteration for $2.9K next year, again with 8GB RAM.

I mean, is it clear that it is upgradable? Because I don’t see any information about that on HP’s site. And it isn’t ridiculous to ask this question as most $1100 laptops don’t have upgradable memory.

So if you’re stuck at 16GB, that’s unacceptable for a developer laptop in 2022, I don’t care what logo is on the back. 32GB is the only acceptable starting point.

You can add memory modules for 32 or 64 GB

The max is 64GB

What workload do you do that 16GB isn't enough? Compiling large database backed .NET projects and Rust projects and AAA gaming all fit fine in 16GB

I regularly see my thinkpad exceed 20 GB with vscode, YouTube music, and docker hosting a frontend, backend, and simulated load.

I've been sitting at 27 GB for the past two days with PyCharm open as well.

They are using as much memory as they can because it is available. Chrome is notorious for this. That is not a valid gauge for how much memory is necessary or even useful.

How about the system freezing? Vscode compiling a flutter project with an Android Emulator open. Firefox with MS Teams, Jura etc, no tab hoarding. Sometimes chrome is open as well. Upgraded to 32gb and the freezes are gone.

16gb is not enough anymore for even such a modest workload.

Electron is never modest. It's an incredible resource hog. Memory has become too cheap, people should think instead of just waste resources. The next generations will need to use an abacus again if this stupidity goes on.

I'm using 18GB on Pop_OS right now and often use more. The main contributors are browser tabs and VS Code. If I closed out the projects I'm not actively working on right now and hunted down anything hogging RAM, I could get back under 16GB, but the nice thing about having 32GB is I almost never have to do that.

I'm pretty sure browsers automatically expand their in-memory cache to fill the available space, things would probably work with less.

I mean, you're probably right to an extent, but I did actually have to close stuff periodically on my old laptop with 16GB of RAM.

My dev workflows on Manjaro with KDE typically required ~18GB RAM (VSC, nodejs, rust, elixir, mongodb, redis, docker, db mgmt tool, browser, mail client, Slack, etc).

On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.

I think my example is extremely average and common.

Looking at docs in a browser

Virtualization is one that I frequently do. Running a VM to test out programs (especially to test out Windows compat, or macOS if you're feeling up to the challenge). 16GB can barely run an additional VM, and if you have 30-40 FF tabs open, an IDE, and so on, then running with just 16GB of memory becomes very restrictive. Allocating 8GB to the (one) VM would leave you with 8 for the host OS, of which 2GB is going to be used by the kernel/WM, and leaves only 6GB to develop with.

> What workload do you do that 16GB isn't enough?

Run a C++ IDE on a medium-large codebase and you can very quickly run out of RAM.