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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#151
post #112
post #56

I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.

The net effect of a crash would be far worse than the benefit of getting a bit of a discount on RAM and storage.

This is why the companies should be aiming for a soft landing to this fad (if they know that they can't make the ROI that makes the industry worthwhile).

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#152
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids) Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performa…

Apple is known to slow older devices intentionally. They have admitted it. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517

That’s the literal truth, but the subtlety behind it was that CPU spikes combined with low voltage batteries were causing phones to shut off. Apple’s slowing down the phone down was nominally because customers prefer slightly slower phones to phones that shut off unexpectedly. Should they have announced this as a feature and had a toggle switch to allow users that preferred the option to disable it? Of course. But I don’t necessarily think they did the wrong thing.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#153
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply. Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to…

> If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market work The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand. But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply. So, th…

Even if the memory market was completely competitive the time it takes to expand supply is measured in years. There was no way for them to serve the AI demand without reducing supply given to everyone else in the short run

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#154

My Dell rep quoted me $736 for a single 16GB RDIMM for the newer Dell Pro 16 laptop, which retails at its baseline configuration with 16GB for ~$1000.

Dell wants $4,507 (web price) for each 32GB RDIMM in a PowerEdge 6625 (16GB is showing as unavailable)

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.

There are never shortages in a free market, just higher prices.

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#156
post #111

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply. Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to…

The distinction is that on the latter case you have a cartel that decided to fix prices and fuck everyone in the ass.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#157
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...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#158
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.

> There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. ...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

Uhm, your link states that they were price fixing over 20 years ago, and were in court for almost a decade. There was another accusation in 2018, but it was dismissed.

That's not a long history of pricing fixing, just accusations.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.

Surely the chinese are spinning up fabs as we speak?

DDR4, and from some comments I have seen around here of only marginally acceptable reliability. It may still take a few years if until they have all the production processes fully under control.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#160
post #127

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…

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.

Except staying on the edge costs exactly the same as not, when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. The problem is that some can afford to lock their capital in the hardware (via one-time investment) and some do not.

R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.

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