The strong case is pretty much only if you can't wait another 3-4 years for ram prices to come back down.

Memory makers are responding with a huge build-out. Building a fab shell and cleanroom takes years, which is why the crunch has lasted so long, but many of these projects are now well underway. New capacity is what ended past memory shortages. New factories going in:

SK hynix

M15X, Cheongju, Korea: first wafers early 2026 (reported), ramping through 2027 Yongin Y1, Korea: first cleanroom Feb 2027 (company target) Yongin Y2, Korea: groundbreaking planned July 2027, first cleanroom June 2029 Micron

ID1, Boise: first wafer output mid-2027 Tongluo, Taiwan: an existing PSMC cleanroom it bought for $1.8B, with meaningful shipments mid-2027 ID2, Boise: late 2028 Hiroshima, Japan: broke ground July 2026, with initial output late 2028 Clay, New York (up to 4 fabs, $100B): broke ground Jan 2026, with first output in 2030 Samsung

P5, Pyeongtaek: mass production 2028 (reported) Yongin national complex: site work began Oct 2026, with the first fab targeting Oct 2029 (reported; Samsung hasn't given a date) Nanya

Fab 5A, New Taipei: 10nm-class EUV DRAM, with wafer starts in 2H 2027 (reported) Tesla / SpaceX (Terafab)

Research fab at Giga Texas, Austin: broke ground April 2026. There's no official output date. Grimes County, Texas (logic, memory, packaging; Phase 1 over $16.8B): land clearing since Aug 2026. Texas filings say commercial operations in 2028, but SemiAnalysis estimates late 2029.

The first real supply relief is 2027, a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.

Sources: Micron FQ4 2026 call, the SK hynix newsroom, TrendForce, Texas JETI filings via ENR, and Tom's Hardware/SemiAnalysis.

The core design is also approaching 3 years old at this point, so it’s not really even that competitive with the latest stuff out of the other chip makers. It’s fine, but nothing to write home about. Certainly not worth the crazy premium Nvidia is charging for it.

The Nvidia based one uses the memory for the GPU allowing you to run AI models on the GPU, the system you're talking about has no such setup. These are Nvidia powered laptops that do what Apple does with their laptops where the system and GPU VRAM are shared as needed, except the idea here is that Nvidia designed these to perform very well for local inference, at least, that's how I understand it.

The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users, and as an architecture, it is very well supported across the Windows ecosystem. The RTX Spark is ARM64, which means more efficient power management at the cost of a small hit to sustained performance loads. But comes at the cost of being less supported when it comes to available software packages.

Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.

i don’t think they’re flying coach after spending 6k on a laptop…

I thought so too, but there's a ton of people out there wading their way through trying to re-purpose their gaming rigs to run qwen3.8-flash-next on their gaming rig (at Q2..) via WSL

She literally posted a link to the patches she wrote to get it to boot linux. That seems like it's not nothing

As someone who was intrigued by these new machines but also has no interest in running Windows, I'm quite happy to learn it works. Though admittedly I was expecting to see DGX OS first.

i would do same if i have to use windows. I will literally pay anything to not use windows, thanks to microslop.

No, the vendor is being too presumptuous. This is clearly a case of them putting their needs above yours.

It is getting progressively more difficult to set up a new Windows laptop without a cloud account. Currently it's a pretty esotaric command line prompt if you know the keybinding to get a terminal open.

Simple™. Easy™.

Microsoft turns on OneDrive backups by default without your knowledge or consent, sending your private files to MS servers, not only during setup but it can also happen during updates. Even when you try keep it disabled, they constantly pressure you into enabling it every time you login, and make it really easy to accidentally turn it on. Once your files are in OneDrive, MS can access them. Don't be surprised if it later turns out they're training their LLMs on people's private files.

I don't want a cloud login telemetry of when I am using my computer, an account that can be disabled by a provider, and constant ads to backup to onedrive. I also moved to linux because of this. (was already a linux guy, but Windows is completely in my rear-view now.)

That is not acceptable in order to use a device you bought.

Also that means you're forced into a manditory arbitration clase and a class action waver.

But who would want that?

The stuff you have to agree to is a very significant cost. You're not just associating a username with a password.

I can get dogshit for free too. Doesn't mean I want it.