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  • Hacker News
  • Inflation, cost of living, purchasing power... I feel like life is getting really difficult right now for most people in ways it hasn't been in decades. I don't think memory prices going up this much this fast is good. I think it's a sign of how bad things are and that we are heading in a terrible direction. I think we're going to get a BIG wave of inflation in 2027.
    by diogenescynic
  • Life on earth today has objectively never been better in the history of our entire species. Try to retain some perspective.
    by SV_BubbleTime
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDPNvcKv_D4 is a good short video to understand this.
    by boxed
  • These unintended (or intended?) affects of the AI boom are yet another cause for hate among a key demographic (people who use/buy/build PCs) who might otherwise be pro-AI but because of this are quite anti-AI.
    by gkanai
  • Seconded. The mad dash for everything is screwing up future expansion opportunities, because everyone in the market wants a future slice at any cost.
    by x-complexity
  • Boy am I feeling this. I had my eye on building a new Threadripper machine, which requires DDR5 RDIMMs. Much to my surprise while happily building out a parts list one fine evening I learned that these are going for between $500 and $1000 for one single 16GB module right now. I think I'll hold off and squeeze a few more years out of DDR4 and PCIe 4.0.
    by rubiquity
  • $580 aud for a single 32gb module last month, that really hurt
    by dbetteridge
  • I just laid an arm and a leg for 128GB of DDR4. More than I normally would have ever spent, because the alternatives were far worse.
    by SV_BubbleTime
  • Just had an HDD in my array die. Thought I'd replace it and add another spare. The prices are up 300% from 2 years ago. For spinning disks. Why?
    by robmccoll
  • I've resorted to buying refurb HDD's for my NAS (which I backup to rsync.net) but like damn!
    by LetsGetTechnicl
  • (1) Because they can. Implied

    (2) If you're WD, Seagate, etc. you may shift all your fabs to higher growth areas which means you create less supply for less demand products (spinning disks)

    by mbesto
  • My theory is demand substitution. NVME/SSD is up so much people at the margin are switching to spinning rust, which nobody was prepared for, so now they too are drowning in demand.
    by mediaman
  • Is the end result of this is that anything that is useful to AI going to be permanently more expensive, as the value a human hobbyist can get out of a certain amount of RAM will always be far less than the value a frontier AI model can get out of it?
    by atleastoptimal
  • If demand remains as elevated as it is you will definitely see new fabs breaking ground to meet it. China is expanding a lot as well. Even if AI doesn’t go anywhere there is no way prices remain this elevated or climb forever
    by TSiege
  • There is no law that states memory must be a consumer product. I truly believe the era of personal computing was a beautiful blip that our masters are beginning to take away from the general public. It could be terminals and time sharing for the foreseeable future through "smart" phones.
    by techteach00
  • This is the ultimate dystopian outcome. How do we stop this?
    by nullbio
  • Just so I make it clear. I'm deeply opposed to this change.
    by techteach00
  • Apple is making Macs and iPhones more powerful every year. Macs are more affordable and powerful that other computers since the M series. People are buying them to run their own private on device AI. This is a signal for personal computing.
    by Cider9986
  • Personal computing has been in a sad state for a while now. Only "PC enthusiasts" were gamers. Rest of the population uses their phone 18hrs a day and seldomly use PC for Excel tasks at work.
    by ivanjermakov
  • I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.

    I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.

    Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.

    by naet
  • I upgraded a year ago and I bought a bunch of extra RAM because it was "so cheap", why not. Man did I get lucky, I got it right before the price hikes started.
    by david422
  • I ordered a new CPU on sale a while back, right when the memory prices started spiking. I didn't even know RAM was going up in price. Realized the CPU needed a new motherboard and ram so I ordered the motherboard, started looking at ram and realized it would cost almost as much as the Mobo and CPU put together. Cancelled the orders because I wasn't intending a big expensive upgrade.

    What I have is still fine, though I do regret cancelling now.

    by sfn42
  • I thought about upgrading my macbook, but I have the M1 Max and it still doesn't feel slow, so I decided it'll probably last another two years. That said, now I feel like this price raise is maybe permanent. If so it will definitely eat into computer makers profits, people will not be upgrading nearly as often.
    by tensor
  • 100% what I do. I buy a few years behind the leading edge, and keep the device until it either dies or will no longer do what I need it to do.

    My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.

    by SoftTalker
  • Doesn't solve the present shortage, but perhaps this is a good opportunity for software developers to start caring about memory usage again, since consumers may be forced to keep their existing hardware for a few more years.
    by g3e0
  • Who the hell needs more than 640 KB anyway? :-)

    Jokes aside, I've been extremely frugal with memory in my latest project, in the hope that it can fit in a few megabytes of RAM. But we have come a long way since the eighties, and now an audio codec (OPUS) takes the best part of a megabyte, and so do "frugal" scripting engines such as Lua and even SQLite \o/.

    by dsign
  • Honestly? Is it even going to be a drop in the bucket? This push is from massive data needs. The amount of ram code uses becomes an even smaller percentage of the growing pool.
    by jayd16
  • Yea here's hope'in. Memory management as been really inefficient for a long time.
    by trinsic2
  • If you want even more bad news: display panel makers also want to raise prices

    "Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own."

    https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-wa...

    by haunter
  • It would strange if just when a lot of articles mention computing / social networks are detrimental, governments start passing laws to forbid platforms and/or phones for kids, and now price gouging flares up everywhere, this would entice people to just stop using these devices and maybe enjoy natural taper-off.
    by jnpnj