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.
totally serious tinfoil territory
@bonifartius Yeah, definitely agree extra ram is nice. My main computer has 32G of ram and I compile everything from tmpfs which is super nice.
That laptop is 10 years old btw, so it was the max I could get at the time.