Is 8GB of RAM enough for a laptop in 2026?

The RAM crisis threatens notebook memory loadouts – and if 8GB laptops make a comeback, are they still tenable?

01 Jan 2026, 12:00 · TechRadar

Features By Darren Allan published 1 January 2026

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There's a crisis in the world of PC components in case you hadn't noticed. Yes, another one, and this time it's memory, the RAM modules which are crucial (pun fully intended) to your computer for running its host operating system and the apps (or games) installed with it.

Why the price of RAM has rocketed skywards is a somewhat complex issue, but by way of simplification, you can blame AI, as well as some past market-related decisions regarding production and supply by memory chip makers. (Check here for a more involved explanation.)

With system RAM prices climbing so steeply during the final quarter of 2025 that it's given consumers and PC makers vertigo – and with those increases expected to continue, at least in the near-term, and there's certainly no sign of any easing, given the predictions of an impending 'RAMageddon' in 2026 – the knock-on effects are inevitable.

This means more expensive laptops, as we've been hearing, with Dell and Lenovo rumored to be hiking the cost of their notebooks by 15% to 20% (though we haven't seen that yet, at the time of writing). There are other aspects to these price rises as well – memory hikes also affect storage, as SSDs use memory chips, and furthermore, GPUs, which have video memory – but system RAM is what's seeing a truly huge spike in cost and driving the potential misery with laptop pricing in 2026.

Although there is another route laptop makers could pursue with their various models, and rather than jacking up prices due to much more costly system RAM, they could simply scale back RAM loadouts.

This is why people are predicting that while in contemporary times, laptop makers have been shifting towards 16GB of RAM as an ideal loadout, we could see those manufacturers reverting to 8GB for more models this year, to effectively keep a lid on prices that way. A recent report from analyst firm TrendForce suggests this will certainly be the case for some notebooks, forecasting a skew towards 8GB laptops probably by Q2 of 2026.

Which begs the key question here: Is 8GB of system RAM still enough for a laptop in 2026? And there's another question besides that, which is intertwined in these issues, namely: what kind of laptops might be in line for a potential drop back to the 8GB level?

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