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Will Micron Leaving the Consumer Market Double Your PC Upgrade Costs Next Year?
The timing of this performance bottleneck is unfortunate for PC users. RAM prices have nearly doubled in late 2025, driven by supply shortages and the overwhelming demand from AI data centers. To make matters worse, Micron Technology recently announced it will exit the consumer memory market by February 2026 to focus exclusively on enterprise AI chips, removing a major affordable option for DIY upgraders. This hardware inflation clashes directly with a software trend where popular communication apps are consuming more memory than ever before.
Why Windows 11 Apps Are Eating Your Memory
The core issue lies in the shift from native application development to web-based frameworks like Electron and WebView2. Developers prefer these tools because they allow a single JavaScript codebase to run across Windows, macOS, and Linux, significantly reducing development costs and time. However, this convenience comes at a steep performance cost for the end user. Every Electron app you open essentially launches a dedicated web browser instance complete with its own rendering engine and security sandboxes, compounding RAM usage with every additional app.
The Worst Offenders: Discord and WhatsApp
Discord has admitted that its Windows client faces memory challenges, with usage often spiking from 1GB to 4GB during extended sessions. To combat this, the company is currently testing an experiment that automatically restarts the app if it remains idle for 30 minutes while consuming excessive memory. WhatsApp has similarly regressed; its previous native UWP client was efficient, but the new WebView2 version runs as a resource-heavy web wrapper that reserves memory even when minimized to the tray.
Microsoft Teams and the WebView2 Problem
Even Microsoft’s own tools are not immune to this inefficiency. Teams has transitioned to WebView2, which technically saves some resources by sharing the Edge browser’s runtime, but it still suffers from the heavy overhead of web technologies. Microsoft plans to mitigate this in January 2026 by introducing a new process, ms-teams_modulehost.exe, to handle calling features separately, though the underlying web architecture remains.
Apple vs. Windows: A Quality Gap
A distinct disparity exists between the two major operating systems. Apple users historically demand polished, native experiences, forcing developers to invest in optimized macOS apps despite the higher cost of development. In contrast, the Windows ecosystem has become accustomed to web wrappers, allowing companies to prioritize cost-cutting over performance optimization without facing significant user backlash.