Personally I won't touch anything with less than 32 GB and 1080p, but people that use a PC like a tablet with a keyboard and a larger screen have different needs. They are the vast majority of buyers.
A friend of mine is thinking about buying a new laptop. We were looking together at what's available in the sub 400 Euro range, basically everything is 4 GB and 1366x768. Add some 200/300 Euro and 8 GB and 1080p start to appear in the lists. Guess what people buy most? The cheapest stuff.
By the way, the new laptop must be Windows because anything different will be too difficult to cope with after 30 years of training. He's replacing the old one (only 2 years old) is getting too slow. Probably a malware party but disinfecting that machine it's a hopeless effort. That one and the previous ones were periodically cleaned and/or reinstalled but there is no way to change those ingrained clicking habits. No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. I told him that he'll be back with a slow PC soon and that he's wasting his money, and I've been wasting my time.
Those numbers seem out of whack to me. 1080p is pretty bad in this day and age, and 32gb is massive overkill for virtually everyone.
My daily machine at home is still a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of RAM, which is admittedly not enough. My work machine was a 2012 Retina MBP with 8GB which was PLENTY for all of my everyday needs except when running VMs. To this day, 8GB is enough for 'most' uses, and my work machines only have 16 to get me over that "8gb-is-not-quite enough" hump. But I've got retina displays everywhere, and a 5k iMac at home. No clue how much memory it has, to be honest, but 32 is insane for not just the average user but even most power users unless they have really specific needs.
I run an IMac with 32gb because I’m a SharePoint developer. A 2012 VM running AD, DNS, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and a SharePoint farm all running takes up 16gb easily. The other 16gb goes to VS Code, XCode, Slack, multiple browsers, Outlook, Docker at times...etc.. Then I gotta shut it down and boot up the SharePoint 2010 VM sometimes which gets 12gb a little less I suppose.
I had 16 GB, got close to the limit working on a project with many containers, upgraded to 32. I leave open projects for 4/5 customers now which is very handy, no need to close and open. That alone is worth the cost of the extra GBs.
I run 64GB in a mac pro, with about 1/2 of it used as a cache for a zfs volume. With it taking half of my ram along with my other daily apps (safari, sublime text, etc) I’m only left with ~10GB free.
> No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business.
This is the weirdest part for me, as I've myself never met a person who'd like to see ads. Installing an adblocker seems to usually be a relevation for people.
Preaching to the converted I know, but: A laptop that's in the shops today is going to be hardly faster than one from two years ago. In the 90s it would have been but the pace has slowed down a lot since then.
Possibly a good candidate for just doing a reformat?
A friend of mine is thinking about buying a new laptop. We were looking together at what's available in the sub 400 Euro range, basically everything is 4 GB and 1366x768. Add some 200/300 Euro and 8 GB and 1080p start to appear in the lists. Guess what people buy most? The cheapest stuff.
By the way, the new laptop must be Windows because anything different will be too difficult to cope with after 30 years of training. He's replacing the old one (only 2 years old) is getting too slow. Probably a malware party but disinfecting that machine it's a hopeless effort. That one and the previous ones were periodically cleaned and/or reinstalled but there is no way to change those ingrained clicking habits. No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. I told him that he'll be back with a slow PC soon and that he's wasting his money, and I've been wasting my time.