Hardware shortages reveal how companies quietly fleeced us for years

Published Nov 14, 2026, 4:30 PM EST Sydney Butler is a technology writer with over 20 years of experience as a freelance PC technician and system builder and over a decade as a professional writer. He's worked for more than a decade in user education. On How-To Geek, he writes commerce content, guides, opinions, and specializes in editing hardware and cutting edge technology articles. Sydney started working as a freelance computer technician around the age of 13, before which he was in charge of running the computer center for his school. (He also ran LAN gaming tournaments when the teachers weren't looking!) His interests include VR, PC, Mac, gaming, 3D printing, consumer electronics, the web, and privacy. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Research Psychology with a minor in media and technology studies. His masters dissertation examined the potential for social media to spread misinformation. Outside of How-To Geek, he hosted the Online Tech Tips YouTube Channel, and wrote for Online Tech Tips, Switching to Mac, and Helpdesk Geek. Sydney also wrote for Expert Reviews UK. He also has bylines at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, Tom's Hardware, MakeTechEasier, and Laptop Mag. It's understandable that anyone creating a product is only incentivized to do the absolute minimum for it to sell. In a monopoly, that bar can be very low indeed, and in a competitive space things are better, but you only have to outperform your rivals, no more. So when a software developer like Microsoft, or a hardware company like NVIDIA tells us that we need to upgrade our computers, because their new software or features simply need us to keep spending, it doesn't feel great when that turns out not to be the case. With skyrocketing RAM, SSD, and GPU prices, people simply don't have the option to keep spending money on software or hardware just to keep up. Now, as if by magic, many of those supposedly unavoidable, hard limits have workarounds. Now, isn't that the strangest thing? Suddenly, Windows works with 8GB PCs Hakuna Matata Credit: MicrosoftCredit: Viktollio/Shutterstock.com In May 2026 (as reported by Tech Powerup), Microsoft pulled a blog post from one of its sites that had been posted a few weeks earlier. The post told readers that if you wanted a "no worries" Windows 11 experience, you needed 32GB of RAM, implying that anything less was suboptimal. This was, of course, well into the downward spiral of RAM economics, and to make things worse, Windows laptops with just 8GB of RAM were being pushed both by Microsoft and other manufacturers. Then, in November 2026, Microsoft said that 8GB of RAM is enough. The 26H2 update shrank the OS' memory requirements using a series of optimizations. The headline claim is that with 8GB of RAM, Windows 11 would now be 20% more responsive and multitask 40% better than before on the same hardware. A combination of memory compression (which is one of the reasons macOS does well with less RAM) and numerous tweaks to resource-hungry core Windows apps and background services has made this possible. None of this was magic; they could have done this all along. Don't get me wrong, it took lots of hard work from very talented and smart software engineers to bring down the Windows 11 memory footprint. The problem is that the work wasn't done before Windows 11 came out. RAM was cheap, so why shouldn't the company simply pass the cost of bloated software onto its customers? This is how you get a situation where Linux runs some Windows software faster than Windows. Even with the overhead of a translation layer, that's still no match for the layer of blubber the Windows kernel is encased within. How many people with 8GB of soldered-in laptop or mini PC RAM had to buy entirely new computers because Microsoft said 16GB is OK-ish, and 32GB is optimal? I bet it adds up to an eye-watering amount of wasted money, and actual e-waste. My graphics card’s capabilities depend on when you ask Nvidia It was just software all along GPU performance had been progressing by leaps and bounds for decades, but just as Moore's Law had started slowing down for CPUs, it was clear the steep climb in GPU performance could not go on forever. Nvidia's 20-series GPUs were perhaps the clearest sign that the company recognized pure horsepower gains weren't going to pay the bills much longer. The first-ever "RTX" cards didn't bring much more in raw graphical power than the superlative 10-series that came before. Instead, it forked into ray-tracing and machine learning. Two technologies that run in parallel to the standard rendering pipeline that has been evolving for decades. DLSS, an AI-based upscaler, is perhaps the most impactful. With this, a GPU can render a game at a lower resolution than the screen's native pixel grid, and an AI model reconstructs the frame to look like it was rendered at a higher level of detail. You get more frames per second, and your eye tells you're looking at a crisper image than the GPU actually rendered. The problem is that with each new generation of DLSS, Nvidia has locked some features to the hardware in newer cards. There's always some technical excuse for it too. For example, when DLSS Frame Generation was launched for 40-series and later cards, it was because the new GPUs had a redesigned hardware optical flow accelerator. Fine. But when DLSS 4 launched, Nvidia stopped using that hardware for frame generation, using a pure tensor-accelerated AI model instead. So why not open it up to older cards? YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed brought out a video where community mods enable frame generation on the cards Nvidia said it couldn't work with. Guess what? The games all look and run fine. If no one had told you it was running on an older-generation card, you probably couldn't tell. So how much money did you spend upgrading to a new GPU to have access to this tech? We won't forget this If (and it's a big "if") computer hardware becomes affordable enough for regular people again, I don't think it will be business as usual. These are just two examples of software and hardware companies showing us that their products could have been better with the right incentives. Well, in the future, that incentive should be "not giving them money" unless the product respects our time and intelligence.