Right, cards on the table. I bang on about 16GB constantly, and a few of you have (fairly) pointed out in the comments that I say that from the comfort of machines with plenty of RAM. So for August I did something about it: I used an 8GB laptop as my only computer for four weeks. Not a review unit on a test bench — my actual daily driver, my emails, my spreadsheets, my embarrassing music library.
Week one: honestly, it was fine
The first week I kept waiting for the stutter, and it mostly didn't come. Browser with 10–15 tabs, Spotify, a Word doc, occasionally Slack. The machine (a Ryzen 5 budget laptop, see my write-ups on what I test and how) handled it all without drama. If your day looks like this, 8GB is genuinely okay, and I'll stop quietly judging the 8GB SKU in my roundups. A bit.
Week two: the Teams wall
Then I had a week of video calls, and it all went sideways. Teams call + screen share + a spreadsheet open + a couple of browser tabs = constant swapping. Fans on, cursor hitching when I alt-tabbed. Closing the spreadsheet helped. Closing the camera helped more. By Friday I'd developed a whole ritual of what to close before accepting a call, which is exactly the kind of tax on your attention that you stop noticing until you're paying it every single day.
Week three: photo editing
Lightroom with a 24MP RAW file: fine on its own. Lightroom while a Chrome window with Gmail, Docs and a YouTube tab sat in the background: painful. Import of 200 photos while anything else ran: go make tea. I'm an amateur at this stuff — a real photographer would have thrown the laptop out of the window by Tuesday, but then a real photographer wouldn't buy this machine in the first place.
Week four: the pattern I actually found
Here's the interesting bit. It was never one app that broke 8GB. It was always the second heavyweight thing. One big app at a time, the machine was fine. Two, and you're living in swap-land. So the question isn't really "is 8GB enough" — it's "do you do two things at once?" And most of us do, even if we pretend we don't.
So what's the answer?
For a kid's homework machine, a spare laptop for the kitchen table, or a writing-only machine: 8GB is fine in 2026, no asterisk. For anything with video calls, photo work, or the honest human reality of "I'll just keep these tabs open": get 16GB, or get something upgradeable. And if the RAM is soldered with no slot (checking the spec sheet is a 30-second job, do it), treat 8GB as a countdown timer, not a feature.
My month over, I plugged my 32GB machine back in and felt a bit silly about how relieved I was. But also: not that silly.
Got a machine with 8GB and a story? Tell me — genuinely curious whether my comment section matches my experience.