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Facepalm: Microsoft launched the more affordable Surface Pro 12 and Surface Laptop 8 last month, with prices starting at $849. The new models feature lower-end configurations than their flagship counterparts, including an older Snapdragon chipset and just 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB. Reviews of the new devices are now in, and, as expected, 8GB of memory is simply not enough to run Windows 11 smoothly.
According to The Verge, 8GB of memory works mostly fine for basic tasks such as web browsing, text editing, and video streaming on YouTube and other streaming platforms. However, the laptop would hang or freeze "for several seconds" whenever someone joined a video call on Microsoft Teams.
The report noted that the laptop struggled to handle the video stream even though it was not running any demanding workloads in the background. At the time, it only had about 10 Chrome tabs open, along with the Slack and Signal apps. The laptop also froze randomly several times a day while working in Google Docs, even when no Teams calls or video streams were running in the background.
