Why do laptops have so little RAM?
My model of the computing world is that RAM is everything and everything should be (in) RAM. Yet if you look at high-end laptops they generally can’t be configured with more than 16 GB of RAM. Perhaps this is a limitation in Intel’s mobile chipsets, but, even if so, that just means that the folks at Intel have decided that laptops should have only 16 GB (about $125 worth), which leaves us with the same question of “Why?”
Example high-spec laptop: http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/ ($3000 with 1 TB of PCIe SSD and yet just 16 GB of RAM max.)
Is RAM power-hungry? I wouldn’t have thought so compared to the screen backlight and what used to be a standard mechanical hard drive.
What’s the performance difference between RAM and PCIe flash storage (“PCIe SSD”)? Doesn’t running virtual memory result in a substantial performance hit compared to telling the operating system not to build a paging file? (maybe it doesn’t matter now that everyone has decided to run a tower of virtual machines, each of which in turn has virtual memory!)
