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  • Hacker News
  • One could also blame crypto and AI (they're clearly responsible for some of the volatility in the graph), but I can see the curve flatten in the 2010s, just as Moore's law ended.
    by Dibby053
  • So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!
    by WithinReason
  • In the first graph, if you hover over the DRAM line you'll notice that the most recent data points are for DDR3. One of the data points from 2025 is a 2 GB stick. This paints a more rosy picture than the situation deserves.
    by fleebee
  • The log scale is nice to compare decades. Wether it's inflation-adjusted or not isn't too important but it's still a factor of 10, which would show in a linear recent graph. The fact that we're comparing GBs instead of the average RAM stick shows how much the price has decreased per GB rather than per unit (much smaller decrease).

    But a linear graph that represents only the last decade and where the bottom is 0 (not the min value) would tell a different story, but I guess we already know that story because we're living it.

    by dominicrose
  • TIL someone took over the now defunct jcmit dataset[1] (archive[2]). I expected his dataset to die off when his website did, but I guess someone found the data dump on archive.org and revived it. Which raises a question: how will this dataset fare five years from now?

    [1]: https://www.jcmit.com/mem2010.htm [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250716092935/https://jcmit.net...

    by jldugger
  • Look at it this way: while the upfront cost to scale up production is huge, prices are now high enough to justify it even if demand is expected to drop abruptly later on. So if you can wait 5 years for your next PC, 1TB RAM might go for what 64GB would have cost without the AI demand spike.

    Granted, if you need a new system before then, you're SOL.

    One thing to look out for is supply capacity curiously going offline in 2030 or whatever. That would hint at market power or collusion.

    by gruntled-worker
  • If my memory serves me correct (no pun intended), when I was a kid I remember bugging my mom to buy me like 2 or 4 1 MB modules, it was at least 50 bucks or 100 bucks each.

    Now everyone's going to talk about how cheap everything is by comparison - but someone needs to talk about how oppressively hungry browsers and OSes are compared to in the past. This is no HIMEM.SYS

    by mancerayder
  • Says, not inflation-adjusted. With reason; adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller.

    Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."

    by fernly

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