tinfoil theory: they still sell devices with 8G ram so that people will get pissed how slow it is (because it's swapping all the time while the browser allocates another gigabyte) and then buy a new one.

@bonifartius How do you run out of 8GB? I have an 8GB laptop with a dead hard disk connector on the motherboard and I just use 4GB as a rootfs (via tmpfs) after booting from a thumbdrive.

@swiley i'm not totally serious, but cheaping out on ram is a bad idea. imho it's really important for performance that you never get into swapland.

sure, it depends on how you use it, i'm using ~2G out of 16. i never regretted buying the 16G stick though :)