16GB is the new minimum for thin-and-light laptops.

Huge. Not in benchmark scores—but in not having your laptop turn into a stuttering mess two years from now.

On a thin-and-light with soldered RAM, 8GB is barely enough today. Windows alone uses 4–5GB. A few Chrome tabs, Slack, Spotify? You’re maxed. Then the laptop starts swapping to the SSD, which is suddenly slow, fans spin up, battery takes a hit. Everything feels sluggish.

16GB gives you breathing room. You can have ten tabs, a video call, and a document open without hitting the wall. The “performance gain” is that your laptop still feels snappy when you ask it to do normal things. It’s not faster—it’s less frustrated.

Don’t buy an 8GB machine in 2025. Future You will thank you.