Ask Paul: January 2 ⭐

Happy Friday, and Happy New Year! We head into 2026 full of uncertainty but also full of hope. So let’s kick of this holiday weekend, and the New Year, on a good note.
? Bad memory, bad
MartinusV2 asks:

While there are high memory prices right now, will that impact the next release of Qualcomm's next Snapdragon x2 success?

I’m not sure that it will impact Snapdragon X2 more or less than it will whatever Intel and AMD are releasing, but I suppose that depends on a variety of factors.

Snapdragon X was widely adopted by PC makers in the sense that all the major players had at least a few models, with more arriving over time. But availability is also a fairly limited because it’s essentially a new and unproven platform and Snapdragon X probably accounted for less than 10 percent of PCs that shipped last year. So that might factor in for the new generation, and we’re just days away from CES 2026 and what rumors tell us will be the first Snapdragon X2-based laptops.

If these appear in market sooner rather than later, I have to assume that the orders were made long ago, so RAM pricing might not factor in all that much. But longer out, that could be an issue for sure. But also an issue for all chips and PCs.

Forced to bet, I don’t see the RAM pricing problems impacting Snapdragon X2 disproportionately. These will mostly be premium PCs with better margins, and it feels more likely that the biggest issues will be with more affordable PCs. I could be completely wrong on that.

Tied to this, I am curious whether we’ll see upgradeable RAM on more laptops, especially. Despite all the right to repair gains, RAM remains the one basic component that’s typically non-upgradeable on modern laptops. And this would be a good place to save some money. A customer who wanted, say, 32 GB of RAM could order a laptop with 16 GB and then upgrade later when the prices are better or enough time has gone by. Regardless of the current crisis, I was curious we haven’t already seen more of this.

With the memory problem, will we see a new revolution in optimization in software that will be more efficient memory or better code optimization?

If it continues for years and/or is permanent, yes. This is one of those “life will find a way” things, similar to what DeepSeek is doing with cloud AI. If you have infinite resources, you’ll use them, but people get inventive when there are restrictions or limitations.

Oddly, this is perhaps one area where AI could help: We could use GitHub Copilot and other AI pair programming tools to refactor code specifically to be more efficient. We should be doing this anyway, of course.
✔️ Mi amiga
wright_is asks:

Thinking of what-ifs... Just reading your year in review and saw the Amiga Forever article ... I always wonder, if Commodore could have sorted itself out and actually marketed the Amiga properly, could it have succeeded, been the 3rd operating system, or even have supplanted the Mac? It had the potential...