Will the RAM crunch force a return to optimisation?
Will the RAM crunch force a return to optimisation?
2026-07-26 Technology, Programming, Business
The RAM crunch has arrived. AI demand is driving up the cost of memory – by the end of 2026, Gartner expects DRAM prices to have increased by 130 percent year-on-year. And in response, consumer hardware manufacturers are shipping their lower-tier devices with less RAM to maintain price points.
The Verge’s review of Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop focused on its cut-down memory and higher price. The £950 entry-level package comes with just 8GB of RAM, and the reviewer noted that it froze regularly in typical use. Apple has taken a similar route, albeit at a lower price point, with the MacBook Neo – a £599 laptop with 8GB of RAM. I wrote at the time that if that spec is enough for anyone, they might be able to get by with just an iPhone.
The MacBook Neo is a laptop built for a different era → Apple's new entry-level laptop ships with just 8GB of RAM – for many, an iPhone is a viable alternative The forgotten art of optimisation
But it shouldn’t be that way. Even these more modest devices are far better equipped than the computers we used 15 years ago, and their components should be more than enough to handle web browsing and productivity apps.
The issue is that optimisation, both in local software and on the web, is at an all-time low. Processing power, memory, and network bandwidth have been so freely available for so long that it’s almost become a forgotten art. Nobody takes the time to optimise code because they are no longer forced to care.
As I type, I have seven tabs open in Firefox and it’s using about 2GB of RAM. That’s partly the fault of the browser (although others are far worse), but mostly it’s on the websites themselves. For example, my X feed occupies more than 100MB, and the aforementioned laptop review is around 80MB. (By comparison, a post on my own site, which still isn’t as optimised as I’d like, currently uses less than 3MB – only 2MB of which is the actual DOM.)
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The most egregious examples are video games. RollerCoaster Tycoon is still renowned for the dedication of its developer Chris Sawyer, who optimised the game for performance by writing the whole thing in assembly with all sorts of interesting little tricks that are still being discovered today. Compare that to last year’s Oblivion remake, which was developed by a far bigger team on a far bigger budget and chugs along at a frame rate that borders on unplayable.
Which way, Silicon Valley?
It feels as though the RAM crunch is pushing us towards a turning point – the only question is which direction the industry will decide to turn in.
On one hand, we could return the craft to software and web development. We could optimise code to minimise resource usage and run much more on our existing hardware. Constraints on consumer memory could force developers to care again, and you’d hope they could leverage AI-augmented tools to increase the efficiency of their code more easily than ever before.
Will we optimise for the available hardware, or move consumer computing to the cloud?
But there is also a darker outcome. If software demands more power than consumers can afford, tech firms could see an opportunity to boost ARR by leasing computing power back to them. This is a world where personal computers would become little more than thin clients, with all the heavy lifting done in a server farm somewhere – for a monthly fee, of course.
Beyond the subscription, the cost to consumers is one of ownership and reliability. If your computer relies on a remote server, any issue with that server or your network connection could interrupt your work. And if the servers for a particular service are turned off altogether, your software could be gone for good – as was the case when Google’s short-lived cloud gaming service Stadia shut down in 2023, revoking access to games in the process.
The future direction of the computing sector depends on values, not just tech. There’s an option to go back, restore some of the craftsmanship to software development, and prolong the utility of existing hardware. The question is whether tech companies can resist the temptation to force consumers into purchases and subscriptions to help the bottom line.
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