Why do laptops STILL have so little RAM?

by philg

About 18 months ago I posted “Why do laptops have so little RAM?” wondering why it was essentially impossible to find a laptop computer with more than 16 GB of RAM. Moore’s Law hasn’t been suspended as far as I know. Laptops are still roughly the same price as a 1.5 years ago. Why do they still have just 16 GB of RAM as a maximum configuration?

[Separately, “Why aren’t SSD or hybrid disk drives more popular in laptop computers?” is a question that I asked 5 years ago. I think the question remains live. Given the low cost of SSDs and vastly higher performance in practice, why is it possible to go to the physical or virtual store and find notebook computers with mechanical hard drives? Are there a huge number of consumers who can’t tell the difference and just look at the number of GB or TB?]

18 thoughts on “Why do laptops STILL have so little RAM?”

  2. SSD’s are out there but the manufacturers are charging a hefty premium for them in laptops. The two recent purchases I made from Dell, I saved $400 by buying hybrid disks and swapping them out for SSD’s myself.

  3. I would sort of agree. RAM and SSDs haven’t increased massively in laptops. One thing that has changed are much better displays even in low end laptop than the terrible 720p rubbish that used to be standard even in 15.4″ laptops.

    I love Apple’s retina macbook pro but they have really stalled on progress apart from the display. My early 2011 (nearly 6 years old) macbook pro is still better than a brand new $2000 13″ rMBP in many ways (it has an aftermarket 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM – which you can’t fit in a new one). The display isn’t as good and the CPU is slightly slower, but I don’t notice that. I do notice on my newer 13″ rMBP that I am constantly out of space!

  4. Like others have more or less said above – I think it’s economics. The manufacturers would cannibalize their overpriced upgrades if higher RAM and SSDs were more standardly available.

  5. I believe Moore’s Law has indeed been suspended. In the old days, a computer became completely useless after three years. My most recent desktop is going on year five and showing no sign of aging. Intel is still selling more or less the same chip. Dell is still charging the same price for more or less the same computer 4 years ago I would argue. PC sales are way down because there simply has not been that much advances in recent years whether it’s hardware or software.

  6. I could imagine there’s little demand for more than 16GB RAM these days. Most laptops are used for office work, web surfing, and light (screen rez) media production. 16GB is plenty for those applications.

    People doing video production, print quality media, CAD, major software development, etc. usually resort to desktops because they need more screen real estate than a laptop provides.

  7. I’m writing this comment on my $170 2014 Acer C720-2802 Chromebook with 2G RAM and 16G SSD.

  8. It costs over 6x per GIG of hard drive space for SSD vs disk, in today’s world. 5 years ago that difference was closer to 15x.

    Its gonna be at least another 6 years with these trends.

  9. But if you save most of your stuff to Dropbox or Gdrive then what do you need more than 16GB drive? 500 is complete overkill.

  11. Most people never get anywhere near needing 8GB.

    Laptops have limited space. It’s either more memory (that most people don’t need) or more something else (Smaller? More battery life?)

    SSD’s are still much more expensive than disks.

    Anyway, it’s nothing like “essentially impossible” to find one.

    https://www.amazon.com/HP-OMEN-15-UHD-Smartfriend/dp/B01J8XQ5X0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472611390&sr=8-1&keywords=laptop+i7+32gb+ram

    https://www.amazon.com/P50-Workstation-i7-6700HQ-Professional-Computer/dp/B01BCR6AWQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1472611390&sr=8-4&keywords=laptop+i7+32gb+ram

    https://www.amazon.com/GL551VW-Notebook-i7-6700HQ-15-6-inch-Windows/dp/B00VKEI3EK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1472611390&sr=8-3&keywords=laptop+i7+32gb+ram

  12. Hipsters can rest easy knowing their 1TB 16GB Macbook Pros from last year are still top of the line & still the same price. Would blame a rapidly falling dollar & the limit of transistor density being reached. When they got to handfuls of electrons per bit, they started building chips vertically, but the price in dollars is going to be prohibitive as long as it takes twice as many dollars every year to pay the rent. The next leap is quantum computing & entanglement, but all those researchers are too busy flipping houses.

  13. My laptop is 6 years old, my work desktop is 7 years old and both are still essentially the same thing you can buy today for roughly the same price. So no, I have no need to buy a new one even for the occasional video editing. And I wouldn’t trade HDD for SSD in a laptop. Not nearly enough space on SSDs. Unless I’d have an option of inserting both at the same time.

  14. Folks: Thanks for the links to the 32 GB laptops. I was aware that a handful of gaming or “workstation” laptops would support 32 GB of RAM but I was talking about what a standard notebook computer motherboard and chipset would support. If Moore’s Law were still with us I would expect a $1000 laptop to have twice as many transistors, and therefore twice as much RAM, as a laptop from 18-30 months ago (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law for how people characterize the current pace). Yet I don’t think that RAM capacity has doubled even compared to the longest time period people suggest for today’s Moore’s Law.

  15. 30 months ago, there were many fewer gaming or workstation laps that shipped with 32GB. So, showing some that do now is more than sufficient as counterpoint.

    And one of them is $1250, which is close enough to your $1000 (which you didn’t me too was a requirement) to be a match.

    For the same price, $1000 laps should be using higher resolution screens than laptops with the same price 30 months ago. Likely, most such laptops today have some sort of SSD when 30 months ago they did not.

    The relatively few people who would be using 32 GB in a laptop would also probably want a much faster CPU (which has other issues in a small device).

    Memory prices haven’t changed much either.

    Again, 32 GB is a niche requirement.

  16. Smartest Woman,
    That’s a great surfing machine and fits in any backpack. Plus, you can have Linux if you’re nerdy. Kinda off topic for 16 GB memory thread.

  17. Intel has a monopoly and dictates prices to PC makers, who have no choice but to buy the latest and fastest chip for high end PCs. Micron and Samsung are in a brutal price war and are price takers so they are in no position to dictate that PC makers buy more RAM.

  18. I’ve always loved more memory and would prefer to have 64 or 128 GB in my iMac (and laptop) by now. But even Apple’s newest model still uses DDR3, which is a quiet backwater nowadays topping out at 8 GB per chip. I see there are DDR4 components in the local store with 16 GB per chip (and 33% higher frequency). Sigh.

    Also, pure SSD. It’s been blessedly quiet and (knock on wood) entirely reliable. By contrast, my previous iMac ate two HDDs before being retired.

    As noted by others, I too have felt neither enticed nor forced to upgrade for several years now. The products have kind of stalled.

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