I’ve been concerned by a low amount of memory in my Asus UX310U laptop for quite a long time, but as I used it quite lightly at home, it never became a problem. It has perfectly capable Intel i3-6100U CPU, nice FullHD screen, 5h+ of battery life, so it made no sense to change the laptop just because of RAM.
Obviously 4Gb of RAM is kind of low by modern standards, but when I bought it I wasn’t planning to use anything resource-heavy like IDE at home, just terminal and browser.
The only case when the lack of RAM was obvious is when the laptop was used by two users. As I share it with my wife, it was often the case, and switching users was quite painful, but I didn’t use it often enough for it to piss me off.
Recently I’ve started to use it more often, for instance to work on latest Advent of Code coding challenge, and it quickly became a problem.
Luckily for me Asus was generous enough to allow RAM upgrades in UX310U, so I could add up to 8Gb to existing 4Gb that are soldered on the motherboard.
So I bought another 4Gb module, unscrewed the lid and to my surprise not only there was a slot for SODIMM RAM, but also a place for SATA 2.5inch drive.
As I had one spare 128Gb SATA SSD in my stash, just after 10 minutes I ended up with double RAM and double the storage.
Unfortunately now the trend is to just solder everything on the logic board, and don’t leave any means for upgrade. Given that I’ve just greatly benefited from ability to upgrade RAM it’s very sad to think that with my next laptop I’ll most likely be left without any way to improve it except for buying a new one (like current MacBook users already have to)