charlie said:
1. Because they can!
2. Price Point.
3. It's just enough RAM to do most "simple" office tasks.
Yes, I was going to say point 3. It may actually be more than just
enough; I don't know what the difference in memory requirements between
Starter and Professional is, but they're still selling machines - at
least netbooks, I think a few others - with only 1G; presumably these
actually work.
It hasn't been very long since 256-512Meg was more memory than you
might possibly need in an average office environment. (Think 486
desktop P/Cs and Windows 3.11.)
Eh? My first PC (Windows 3.1) - granted only a 386SX - had 4M! By the
time I got up to 486, I don't think I had more than 16M, or possibly 32,
and it was flying along; my old '98lite laptop works perfectly
adequately in its 128M. 256 would just about run (though crawl would be
a better description - I've used such a system) XP; 512 was more than
adequate for XP up to SP1 or maybe 2, if you didn't do much.
I don't think many 486 mobos would actually _take_ 256-512M, though I
could be wrong about that.
The sad part is that software "bloat" has consumed the hardware almost
continuously, resulting in more "whistles and bells", and not the speed
increase that everyone might prefer.
Another sad way of looking at it is that they always stop making the
bottom end machines; the cheapest you can get _has_ fallen over the
years, but very gradually, because the spec. of the cheapest machines
keeps going up. Thus access to computing remains out of the hands of the
poorest - other than second-hand of course, though that has support
problems.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
I'm sometimes a bit bewildered by that, really - there are no young people in
it, there's no sex, there's no violence, no car chases and there's no action
and no vampires. - Colin Firth on the success of the film "The King's Speech".
Radio Times 10-16 September 2011
