Buying guide
How much RAM and storage do you need?
Short answer: 16GB and 512GB. Long answer below, for people who enjoy that sort of thing.
RAM (memory)
RAM is your laptop’s desk space: the more you have, the more things you can have open at once before it starts shuffling papers onto the floor (the storage drive), which is what makes laptops feel slow.
| RAM | Who it suits |
|---|---|
| 4GB | Basic Chromebooks only. Avoid for Windows. |
| 8GB | Minimum for Windows 11: web, email, Office, streaming. Tight with lots of tabs. |
| 16GB | The sweet spot. Heavy multitasking, students, most office and light creative work, gaming. |
| 32GB+ | 4K video editing, big software builds, virtual machines, local AI models. |
Many thin laptops and all MacBooks have RAM soldered to the board, so you can’t upgrade it later. Buy what you’ll need in three years, not today.
Storage (SSD)
Always choose a solid-state drive (SSD). Old-style spinning hard drives and very slow eMMC storage are what make cheap laptops feel painful.
| Storage | Who it suits |
|---|---|
| 64–128GB | Chromebooks and cloud-only users. Windows updates alone will fight you for space. |
| 256GB | Fine if your files live in OneDrive, iCloud or Google Drive. |
| 512GB | Most people. Room for photos, apps and a few games. |
| 1TB+ | Gamers (modern titles can be 100GB+ each), photographers, video editors. |
Remember that a chunk of the advertised storage is used by the operating system and preinstalled apps, so a “256GB” laptop has noticeably less free space out of the box.