Microsoft will shrink Windows to fit 8GB machines as RAM prices quadruple

Microsoft is making it a priority to shrink the Windows memory footprint so the operating system runs well on machines with just eight gigabytes of RAM. Pavan Davuluri, President of Windows and Devices, wrote in a blog post that the company is working on “reducing Windows memory footprint to deliver a fast and responsive Windows experience across the PCs customers use every day.” The announcement comes as a global memory shortage has quadrupled RAM costs, pushing even budget laptops toward price points that most consumers cannot reach.

The technical approach involves three pieces: a more efficient memory allocator inside Windows itself, performance tuning for WinUI 3 (the framework behind modern Windows apps), and efficiency improvements for Chromium and WebView2, the browser engine that underpins Edge and dozens of other applications. None of these changes will make 8GB machines feel like 16GB ones, but Microsoft is betting that trimming overhead at the operating system level can keep older and cheaper hardware usable for longer.

The timing matters because Microsoft has spent the past year pushing Copilot+ PCs, a hardware tier that requires a neural processing unit capable of 40 trillion operations per second and a minimum of 16GB of RAM. That specification effectively locked out every budget machine on the market. The company has already started walking back its AI ambitions on cheaper hardware, making Copilot uninstallable after only three percent of users opted to pay for it, and shipping watered-down Surface laptops with 8GB of RAM that carry no Copilot+ branding.

The memory crisis is not a Microsoft problem alone. RAM prices have surged because AI data centres are consuming vast quantities of high-bandwidth memory, tightening supply for the consumer chips that go into ordinary PCs. Samsung has said the shortage will not ease until 2028.

Gartner estimates that memory now accounts for 23 percent of the bill of materials for a typical PC, and projects that the sub-$500 PC segment will effectively disappear by 2028 as costs continue to climb.

The squeeze has already rippled into adjacent products. Microsoft raised Xbox prices for the third time this year, citing memory costs as a primary driver. Intel, meanwhile, has launched Project Firefly, an initiative to redesign PC architectures around tighter memory budgets.

The entire industry is adjusting to the reality that cheap RAM is not coming back any time soon.

For Microsoft, the 8GB optimisation effort is an implicit admission that the Copilot+ PC vision outran the market. Most Windows machines in active use today have 8GB of RAM or less, and their owners are not upgrading because upgrade prices have doubled or tripled. If Windows itself becomes too bloated for those machines, users do not move to Copilot, they move to Chromebooks or keep running older versions of Windows indefinitely.

Davuluri did not provide a timeline for when the memory improvements would ship, but the blog post framed the work as an active engineering priority rather than a long-term research project. The changes to the memory allocator and WinUI 3 are expected to arrive in future Windows 11 updates, though Microsoft has not committed to a specific release.