For most of the last ten years, 16GB of memory was the safe answer. Buy it, forget it, and the machine stayed comfortable for five or six years. That advice is now on the edge of expiring, and the reason is not gaming.
What changed
Three things stacked up. Browsers got heavier, and most work now happens inside one. Background services — file sync, security tools, meeting apps that never fully close — hold more resident memory than they used to. And local AI features, whether you asked for them or not, are increasingly running on the device rather than in a data centre.
Individually none of these is dramatic. Together they turn 16GB from comfortable into adequate, and adequate degrades badly over a laptop’s lifetime.
The soldered-memory problem
This would matter less if memory were still upgradeable. On most thin laptops it is not: RAM is soldered to the board, and the configuration you buy is the configuration you keep. The decision you make in the shop is the decision for the machine’s entire life.
How to decide
If the laptop is a browsing-and-documents machine and you replace it every three years, 16GB is still fine. If you keep machines for five years or more, run virtual machines or containers, edit video or photos, or expect to experiment with local AI models, pay for 32GB now. The upgrade typically costs less than a fifth of the machine and buys a meaningful amount of extra life.
What not to overspend on
Memory speed matters far less than capacity for ordinary work. Do not pay a premium for faster RAM at a lower capacity — that is the wrong trade in almost every case.
