Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I have Firefox, Slack, MS Team, MS Word, MS Excel, and Onenote opened. The world's most boring office worker use case.

I know it's a deceptive metric but Task Manager shows 12.5GB "In Use". 16.2 Committed.

Each Firefox tab has between 250mb and 1g "Memory (Active Working Area)".

HUUUUUGeeeee long tail of 100MB trailing down to 20MB services and things. Adobe has half a dozen at all times, etc etc etc.

I'm game to use any other "more realistic" specification or monitor as I know that with memory paging and virtualization things are wonky.

I don't think this indicates I MUST have 12 or 16 or 32GB - I have a 4GB media PC that works just fine. But I do believe it's an indicator average user can use 16GB, if it's available. Or in other words, if I buy a $1000USD laptop, I don't think 16GB is going to waste away unused with zero benefit ever :-\

Again, perfectly willing to be educated :).




> Slack

You're lucky any of those other applications opened at all!


Those apps will use memory as they are given it, for the most part.


Yes, largely because two of those are (bad) Electron apps that eat way more memory than they have any right to.


What is the person buying a laptop supposed to do about that?


Oh, I don't disagree even remotely! We can have a nice thread about optimized apps and 4k demos :)

But in context of expectations in the $1k laptop market, my point was that perfectly normal usage can grow to benefit from over 8GB of RAM these days, whatever the background reasons may be.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: