For last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs). Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing. New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g.,…
> Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs it was only less than 10 yrs ago that a high end PC would have this level of ram. I think the last decade of cheap ram and increasing core count (and hz) have spoiled a lot of people. We are just returning back on trend. May be software would be written better now that you cannot expect the average low budget PC to have 32G of ram and 8 cores.
A budget PC today at a certain price point (say, $500) would certainly have a lot more powerful CPU and faster disk storage and faster RAM than a similarly priced PC just 5 years ago.
But as OSes and programs get more bloated and more complex, I feel 1TB+ SSDs are required these days in PCs. Windows OS and programs themselves can take up hundreds of GBs of space.
But you will notice that budget PCs are being launched these days with lower-grade CPUs (i3 or equivalent), lesser RAM (8GB), lesser storage (256 or 500GB) SSD.
We seem to be regressing backwards in specs for PCs and even mobiles (good luck finding features like NFC and wireless charging in budget phones these days; though these features were available in same segment (budget phones) few years ago).
And it is not just due to AI, it is due to hardware manufacturers and assemblers thinking they can hoodwink consumers and sell us less value for more price.