Technology

RAM has always gone through huge price cycles as long as I can remember. You buy when it is good value then don't when it goes up. The industry always responded to high prices by building too much capacity so after a few years the prices all crashed.

This time it feels different. We don't have the huge diversity of producers we once did. The 3 big remaining players clearly operate as something like a cartel. I doubt they are responding to current shortages with huge new fab investments.

Lots of PC part manufacturers and retailers aren't going to make it through to the over side of this. I think it could lead to massive long term changes for the DIY market.

1gb of ram costs more than 1 hour of minimum wage

I'm looking for 64 GB (4x16) DDR4-2400 SODIMM. It is going to run me like 350 bucks... For used modules.

Absolutely ridiculous.

I quite like the idea of people just not engaging with this.

Can't play the latest AAA because I can't afford the equipment for it? No worries, there's literally thousands of other games out there.

More realistically though, people will end up subbing to a streaming service, which is almost certainly what the companies would prefer.

Devs just need to optimize their software. My i5 750 still works just fine with a 1060 and 16gb ram. Their's thousand of great games to play, fuck the aaa.

Upgraded my homelab with 256GB right before the prices went nuts. Lucky me.

But before I bought the best GPU at the time for absolute peak-price, adamant it would rise further and never going back.

So...universe equalized for me. For now.

Going back to the 90s when a few megabytes was hundreds of dollars.

HDDs have doubled in price recently too. Not a good time to try building a computer.

I just had to buy a m.2 drive. It cost more than double the same item I bought in 2022. It also cost more than the entire computer it's being installed into! FML.