And wouldn't you know it, if I had've chosen Cathay Pacific for this year's Oz pilgrimage, I would've been passing through HK in a few weeks anyway...
I might give up this laptop hunt for a while. I'm fairly sure the x280 will be what I want given what I use computers for and how I use them, but six months from now might be easier...
Right now for instance, I have a newly acquired 8gb on my six year old y470p. Using this lumbering beast as I usually do, win7 will put between 4 and 5 gb of that ram to immediate use and keep the rest on standby, leaving usually none unused. I can cause between 6 and 7gb to be used directly if I, say, open a bunch of resource intensive browser windows (like, say, some collection of forum pages dedicated to youtube videos) and maybe an email client and another browser doing something else and maybe some other programs...
Which is to say, it looks like 8gb is in general enough - one has to be really sloppy in managing their open programs, or to have some wildly resource intensive thing like some video or music composition software open - to even get close to directly using all the available ram. But see, that's what windows does. I can do the same tests on my 2gb laptop running win10 and it looks like the os routinely only keeps 1gb in immediate operation - which it does, it makes choices about how to manage physical ram and pagefiles.
Which, ironically, is what is convincing me to get 16gb. I know for instance that cpu will probably make the difference more than anything but all I know about cpus is I have a version 1 i5 and hardware support for hevc decoding wasn't introduced until version 4...
I enjoy specifications, obvs. I'll probably only get a real machine after I decide finally whether or not win10 is the devil.