With Micron shuttering their consumer RAM manufacturing and Samsung not even selling RAM to their own electronics division, it is now obvious that AI will make things quite expensive for everyone. With RAM prices skyrocketing lately, have any of your planned purchases been affected?
I know a lot of people who impulsively bought things like phones, laptops, and ram kits this holiday season only to be vindicated last week.
So far, this price surge seems to affect both DDR4 and (more severely) DDR5 RAM for customized desktops and servers, but this will surely trickle down to all consumer electronics OEMs. If you’re thinking about buying a new smartphone or laptop, you should probably buy them right now when holiday sales are still happening.
Even smaller clevo manufacturers like NovaCustom are raising prices starting in 2026.
Most of all, I feel bad for anyone planning to get into self-hosting, but hypothetically could they get away with using an older CPU and DDR3 ram? How about folks who are forced to buy used computers or phones that may be insecure? There are a lot of maybes but we don’t have a clear solution for the next few years.
Apple being market price is never something I could have predicted in 2025-2026.
I wonder if they’ll be affected less compared to other companies. Apple have more control of their supply chain compared to other companies but RAM production is obviously outsourced. Maybe they’ll eat the cost difference?
Looking forward to see how they’ll react next year for sure. I’m glad that NovaCustom at least gave their customers a fair warning now. All three of them make very expensive laptops though independent of the shortage.
I mean, their Mac Mini right now is fantastic value for a computer. Rivaling other mini PCs. But I hear you.
They won’t. They have the corporate power to keep prices status quo and are not like others who immediately flinch and call it when the market fluctuates. So, you’re right about control. Though we’ll have to see with new releases on computers.
I fear selfhosted homelab projects are temporarily out of reach for this anonymous internet guy
I have a pile of crappy early-2000s DDR2/DDR3 servers, maybe I’ll waste a day trying to turn them into some kind unholy, power-hungry cluster computation abomination that falls just short of today’s bare-minimum server standards
hopefully costs come back down from looneytoonville
Power-hungry NAS is where I’m thinking for these folks. But yes, it is unfortunate to start this hobby right now. I even heard that SSD prices are also going to be affected.
Owning a computer or rather buying one is going to become a luxury. AI & hype is eating it all.
What do these people want? They can’t make AI profitable. No matter how you do the math, it can’t work. Its delusional to think so. These people are f-ing idiots and this is more and more becoming objectively clear and becoming less of an opinion.
yeah it’s a mess, tbf idk which is worse, the GPU shortage or the RAM shortage
I would honestly say the GPU Shortage was probably worse as not only you had crypto miners piling these GPUs but also the demand skyrocketing due to lockdown
this shortage is just a domino effect AI Bros are causing, you got them and the AI Companies and now memory manufacturers are going to lick their boots while we get left behind
to my understanding GPUs are not impacted as much as normal memory is, prices are still normal as of now.
Now sure nvidia did call Board Partners that they’re on their own and now have to source their own VRAM which in turns will increase Prices on Nvidia GPU, but i’ve yet to see AMD and Intel be effected
Of course insert the Soldier “Any second now… Aaany second now…” meme here but that’s about as far as I’ll say
It’s a market bubble, right? Adding AI raises stock price, shareholders see line go up. Regardless of whether the product actually adds value or generates profit. My technical understanding of market bubbles are when stock price and real product value diverge
If so, good news, bubbles pop. RAM prices will collapse. Bad news, probable global recession
All that you’re saying here is right. Bad news is going to be a lot more than just recession. The ripple effects are incalculable.
Also, RAM prices may fall down but companies will still want to keep it up. Prices seldom come down to normal again. They’ll blame the supply chain and other issues caused by the recession.
