Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait.
I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650!
Just in the past week, we found out Raspberry Pi's increasing their single board computer prices. Micron's killing the Crucial brand of RAM and storage devices completely, meaning there's gonna be one fewer consumer memory manufacturer. Samsung can't even buy RAM from themselves to build their own Smartphones, and small vendors like Libre Computer and Mono are seeing RAM prices double, triple, or even worse, and they're not even buying the latest RAM tech!
I think PC builders might be the first crowd to get impacted across the board—just look at these insane graphs from PC Parts Picker, showing RAM prices going from like $30 to $120 for DDR4, or like $150 to five hundred dollars for 64 gigs of DDR5.
But the impacts are only just starting to hit other markets.
Libre Computer mentioned on Twitter a single 4 gigabyte module of LPDDR4 memory costs $35. That's more expensive than every other component on one of their single board computers combined! You can't survive selling products at a loss, so once the current production batches are sold through, either prices will be increased, or certain product lines will go out of stock.
The smaller the company, the worse the price hit will be. Even Raspberry Pi, who I'm sure has a little more margin built in, already raised SBC prices (and introduced a 1 GB Pi 5—maybe a good excuse for developers to drop Javascript frameworks and program for lower memory requirements again?).
Cameras, gaming consoles, tablets, almost anything that has memory will get hit sooner or later.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but compared to the current market, Apple's insane memory upgrade pricing is... actually in line with the rest of the industry.
The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies.
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