Dedicated GPUs in gaming laptops are a necessity for the IT industry, as it forces manufacturers, assemblers and software makers to be more creative and ambitious with power draw and graphics software, and better optimal usage of available hardware resources (e.g., better battery and different performance modes to compensate for the higher power consumption due to the GPU; so a low-power mode enabled by casual user will disable the dedicated GPU and make the OS and apps dependent on the integrated GPU instead, but same/another user using same PC can switch to dedicated GPU when playing a game or doing VFX or modeling).

Without dedicated GPUs, we consumers will get only weaker hardware, slower software and the slow death of graphics software market. See the fate of Chromebooks market segment - it is almost dead, and ChromeOS itself got abandoned.

Meanwhile, the same Google which made ChromeOS as a fresh alternative OS to Windows, Mac and Linux, is trying to gobble the AI market. And the AI race is on.

And the result of all this AI focus and veering away from dedicated GPUs (even by market leader nVidia, which is no longer having GPUs as a priority) is not only the skyrocketing price hikes in hardware components, but also other side effects. e.g., new laptops are being launched with NPUs which are good for AI but bad for gaming and VFX/CAD-CAM work, yet they cost a bomb, and the result is that budget laptop market segment has suffered - new budget laptops have just 8GB RAM, 250GB/500GB SSD, and poor CPU, and such weak hardware, so even basic software (MS Office) struggles on such laptops. And yet even such poor laptops are having a higher cost these days. This kind of deliberate market crippling affects hundreds of millions of students and middle class customers who need affordable yet decent performance PCs.

For me it's a necessity to run the software I need to do my work (CAD design)

Same here... I do not wish for a laptop with >65W USB-C power requirements.

Yea I agree it's not worth it to have a igpu a dedicated. If I'm correct in what you are talking about. There's always issues with that setup in laptops. But I'd stay away from all laptops at this point until we get an Adminstration that enforces anti trust. All manufactures have been cutting so many corners, your likely to have hardware problems within a year unless it's a MacBook or a business class laptop.

Low end gaming ia 2d indie titles and they now run on toasters.

All the popular mass matket games work on iGPU: fortnite, roblox, mmos, arena shooters, battlen royales. Good chunk of cross platform console titles also work just fine.

You can play Cyberpunk or BG3 on damn Steam Deck. I wont call this low end.

Number of games that dont run to some extent without dGPU is limited to heavy AAA titles and niche PC only genres.

No Ryzen 5 system should have any trouble playing YouTube videos, there must have been something wrong with your system.

Thats a problem with youtube not your gpu!

What processor are we talking about?

Your experience is extremely weird

> RAM and SSDs both use NAND flash and are equally affected by wafer hoarding, strategic supply reductions and market price manipulation.

Why on earth you think RAM uses NAND flash ?

You can impose CPU restrictions in Windows 10 or 11 too...

You can limit CPU usage for a program in Windows by adjusting the "Maximum processor state" in the power options to a lower percentage, such as 80%. Additionally, you can set the program's CPU affinity in Task Manager. Please note this will only affect the process scheduling.

You can also use a free tool like Process Lasso or BES to limit the CPU for a Windows application. You can use a free tools like HWInfo, SysInternals (ProcMon, SysMom, ProcDump) to monitor and check for CPU usage, especially to investigate CPU spikes caused by rogue (malware or poor performance) apps.

More like 128MB.

512MB in 2000 was like HEDT level (though I'm not sure that acronym existed back then)

Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.

I was being lazy, but optimized I guess I could get down to 4GB of ram.

Eh? As I see it, we've got options.

Option A: We do a better job at optimizing software so that good performance requires less RAM than might otherwise be required

Option B: We wish that things were different, such that additional RAM were a viable option like it has been at many times in the past.

Option C: We use our time-benders to hop to a different timeline where this is all sorted more favorably (hopefully one where the Ballchinians are friendly)

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To evaluate these in no particular order:

Option B doesn't sound very fruitful. I mean: It can be fun to wish, but magical thinking doesn't usually get very far.

Option C sounds fun, but my time-bender got roached after the last jump and the version of Costco we have here doesn't sell them. (Maybe someone else has a working one, but they seem to be pretty rare here.)

That leaves option A: Optimize the software once, and duplicate that optimized software to whomever it is useful using that "Internet" thing that the cool kids were talking about back in the 1980s.

> I think root comment is looking at the overall picture of what all customers can get for their money, and see it getting worse.

A $999 MacBook Air today is vastly better than the same $999 MacBook Air 5 years ago (and even more so once you count inflation).

This is it. Buy used Dell and HP hardware with 32 GB of RAM and swap the pcie ssd for 4 TB.

Exclusively using a ever dwindling stock of old hardware is not really a practical solution to preserving hardware rights in the long term

Ah that makes sense. Thanks for the insight.

Have the laws of supply and demand been suspended? Capital is gonna pour into memory fabrication over the next year or two, and there will probably be a glut 2-3 years from now, followed by retrenchment and wails that innovation has come to a halt because demand has stalled.

If "performant" devices are not widespread then telemetry will reveal that the app is performing poorly for most users. If a new festure uses more memory and sugnificantly increases the crash rate, it will be disabled.

Apps are optimized for the install base, not for the engineer's own hardware.

Can confirm, I'm currently requesting as much RAM as can fit in the chassis and permission to install an OS not too divorced from what we run in prod.

On the bright side, I'm not responsible for the UI abominations people seem to complain about WRT laptop specs.

How many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?

> a significant part of the world is already running lower powered devices

but you cannot consider this in isolation.

The developed markets have vastly higher spending consumers, which means companies cater to those higher spending customers proportionately more (as profits demand it). Therefore, the implication is that lower spending markets gets less investment and less catered to; after all, R&D spending is still a limiting factor.

If the entirety of the market is running on lower powered devices, then it would get catered for - because there'd be no (or not enough) customers with high powered devices to profit off.

It has also made it easier than ever to build native applications that use the os provided toolkits and avoid adding a complete web-tech stack to everything.